Chinese Journal of Magnetic Resonance ›› 2010, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (3): 379-385.

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Evaluation of Diffusion Spectrum Imaging Tractography after Susceptibility-Induced Distortion Correction by Model-Based Point Spread Function Method

 HSU YUNG-Chin1, HSU Ching-Han1, TSENG Wen-Yih Isaac2   

  1. 1. Department of Biomedical Engineering and Environmental Sciences, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300;
    2. Center for Optoelectronic Biomedicine and Department of Medical Imaging, National Taiwan University College of Medicine and Hospital, Taipei 100
  • Received:2010-07-14 Online:2010-09-05 Published:2010-09-05

Abstract:

Echo-planar imaging suffers from susceptibility-induced distortion in the frontal lobe, temporal lobe and brain stem regions. To correct for the distortion, recently we proposed an easy-implemented and effective method called model-based point spread function (PSF) method. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of distortion correction from the perspective of fiber tracking. The evaluation was carried out by applying the modelbased PSF method on diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) dataset and comparing the number of cingulum tracts generated from the distorted DSI dataset and the corrected DSI dataset. An index representing the effectiveness of distortion correction was defined as: r=(Nc-Nd)/(Nc+Nd), where Nc and Nd were, respectively, the number of tracts generated from DSI dataset after distortion correction and that without correction. For the left and right cingulum bundles, the ratios of the effectiveness of distortion correction were 0.424±0.452 (mean±SD) and 0.343±0.452, respectively. In addition, the ratios of both cingulum bundles were significantly greater than zero, indicating that the tracking results after distortion correction were better than those without correction. In conclusion, our results suggest that application of distortion correction on DSI dataset using the model-based PSF method can significantly improve the fiber tracking results.

Key words: susceptibility-induced distortion, model-base PSF method, diffusion spectrum imaging, cingulum bundles

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