Local estimation of the noise level in MRI using structural adaptation

We present a method for local estimation of the signal-dependent noise level in magnetic resonance images. The procedure uses a multi-scale approach to adaptively infer on local neighborhoods with similar data distribution. It exploits a maximum-likelihood estimator for the local noise level. The validity of the method was evaluated on repeated diffusion data of a phantom and simulated data using T1-data corrupted with artificial noise. Simulation results are compared with a recently proposed estimate. The method was applied to a high-resolution diffusion dataset to obtain improved diffusion model estimation results and to demonstrate its usefulness in methods for enhancing diffusion data

Structural adaptive segmentation for statistical parametric mapping

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging inherently involves noisy measurements and a severe multiple test problem. Smoothing is usually used to reduce the effective number of multiple comparisons and to locally integrate the signal and hence increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Here, we provide a new structural adaptive segmentation algorithm (AS) that naturally combines the signal detection with noise reduction in one procedure. Moreover, the new method is closely related to a recently proposed structural adaptive smoothing algorithm and preserves shape and spatial extent of activation areas without blurring the borders

Modeling the orientation distribution function by mixtures of angular central Gaussian distributions

In this paper we develop a tensor mixture model for diffusion weighted imaging data using an automatic model selection criterion for the order of tensor components in a voxel. We show that the weighted orientation distribution function for this model can be expanded into a mixture of angular central Gaussian distributions. We show properties of this model in extensive simulations and in a high angular resolution experimental data set. The results suggest that the model may improve imaging of cerebral fiber tracts. We demonstrate how inference on canonical model parameters may give rise to new clinical applications

High resolution fMRI: Overcoming the signal-to-noise problem

Increasing the spatial resolution in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) inherently lowers the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In order to still detect functionally significant activations in high-resolution images, spatial smoothing of the data is required. However, conventional non-adaptive smoothing comes with a reduced effective resolution, foiling the benefit of the higher acquisition resolution. We show how our recently proposed structural adaptive smoothing procedure for functional MRI data can improve signal detection of high-resolution fMRI experiments regardless of the lower SNR. The procedure is evaluated on human visual and sensory-motor mapping experiments. In these applications, the higher resolution could be fully utilized and high-resolution experiments were outperforming normal resolution experiments by means of both statistical significance and information content