A continuous tensor field approximation of discrete DT-MRI data for extracting microstructural and architectural features of tissue.

The effective diffusion tensor of water, D, measured by diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI), is inherently a discrete, noisy, voxel-averaged sample of an underlying macroscopic effective diffusion tensor field, D(x). Within fibrous tissues this field is presumed to be continuous and smooth at a gross anatomical length scale. Here a new, general mathematical framework is proposed that uses measured DT-MRI data to produce a continuous approximation to D(x). One essential finding is that the continuous tensor field representation can be constructed by repeatedly performing one-dimensional B-spline transforms of the DT-MRI data. The fidelity and noise-immunity of this approximation are tested using a set of synthetically generated tensor fields to which background noise is added via Monte Carlo methods. Generally, these tensor field templates are reproduced faithfully except at boundaries where diffusion properties change discontinuously or where the tensor field is not microscopically homogeneous. Away from such regions, the tensor field approximation does not introduce bias in useful DT-MRI parameters, such as Trace(D(x)). It also facilitates the calculation of several new parameters, particularly differential quantities obtained from the tensor of spatial gradients of D(x). As an example, we show that they can identify tissue boundaries across which diffusion properties change rapidly using in vivo human brain data. One important application of this methodology is to improve the reliability and robustness of DT-MRI fiber tractography.