Stepwise Stochastic Dictionary Adaptation Improves Microstructure Reconstruction with Orientation Distribution Function Fingerprinting.

Abstract

Fitting of the multicompartment biophysical model of white matter is an ill-posed optimization problem. One approach to make it computationally tractable is through Orientation Distribution Function (ODF) Fingerprinting. However, the accuracy of this method relies solely on ODF dictionary generation mechanisms which either sample the microstructure parameters on a multidimensional grid or draw them randomly with a uniform distribution. In this paper, we propose a stepwise stochastic adaptation mechanism to generate ODF dictionaries tailored specifically to the diffusion-weighted images in hand. The results we obtained on a diffusion phantom and in vivo human brain images show that our reconstructed diffusivities are less noisy and the separation of a free water fraction is more pronounced than for the prior (uniform) distribution of ODF dictionaries.