From ADC to Probability Profiles: The Diffusion Orientation Transform

E. Ozarslan, T. M. Shepherd, B. C. Vemuri, S. J. Blackband, T. H. Mareci National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States INTRODUCTION Diffusion-weighted MRI provides a non-invasive means to map the neural connections between functionally connected regions of the central nervous system. High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) [1] has the potential to capture the orientational structure even in regions with complicated architecture from relatively limited number of scans at lower diffusion-weightings. However, an important challenge is to reliably map the signal (hence the apparent diffusivity) profiles into estimates of the water displacement probabilities. The Diffusion Orientation Transform achieves this by establishing a direct link between the diffusivity and probability profiles.