Resolving intravoxel white matter structures in the human brain using regularized regression and clustering

Abstract

Abstract The human brain is a complex system of neural tissue that varies significantly between individuals. Although the technology that delineates these neural pathways does not currently exist, medical imaging modalities, such as diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), can be leveraged for mathematical identification. The purpose of this work is to develop a novel method employing machine learning techniques to determine intravoxel nerve number and direction from dMRI data. The method was tested on multiple synthetic datasets and showed promising estimation accuracy and robustness for multi-nerve systems under a variety of conditions, including highly noisy data and imprecision in parameter assumptions.

Keywords

• Ball-and-stick model
• Diffusion MRI
• Tractography
• Nerve
• Neural tracts
• Brain imaging