The ellipsoidal area ratio: an alternative anisotropy index for diffusion tensor imaging.

In the processing and analysis of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data, certain predefined morphological features of diffusion tensors are often represented as simplified scalar indices, termed diffusion anisotropy indices (DAIs). When comparing tensor morphologies across differing voxels of an image, or across corresponding voxels in different images, DAIs are mathematically and statistically more tractable than are the full tensors, which are probabilistic ellipsoids consisting of three orthogonal vectors that each has a direction and an associated scalar magnitude. We have developed a new DAI, the "ellipsoidal area ratio" (EAR), to represent the degree of anisotropy in the morphological features of a diffusion tensor. The EAR is a normalized geometrical measure of surface curvature in the 3D diffusion ellipsoid. Monte Carlo simulations and applications to the study of in vivo human data demonstrate that, at low noise levels, EAR provides a similar contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) but a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than does fractional anisotropy (FA), which is currently the most popular anisotropy index in active use. Moreover, at the high noise levels encountered most commonly in real-world DTI datasets, EAR compared with FA is consistently much more robust to perturbations from noise and it provides a higher CNR, features useful for the analysis of DTI data that are inherently noise sensitive.