Tracking the Cortico-Spinal Tract from Low Spatial and Angular Resolution Diffusion MRI

Abstract : In this work, we present a pipeline to reconstruct the corticospinal tract (CST) that connects the spinal cord to the motor cortex. The proposed method combines a new geometry-based multi-compartment diffusion model coined Diffusion Directions Imaging and a new adaptive multi-modal particle filter for tractography. The DTI Tractography challenge proposes to test our methods in the context of neurosurgical planning of tumor removal, where very low spatial and angular resolution diffusion data is available due to severe acquisition time constraints. We took up the challenge and present our reconstructed CSTs derived from a single-shell acquisition scheme at b = 1000 s/mm2 with only 20 or 30 diffusion gradients (low angular resolution) and with images of 5 mm slice thickness (low spatial resolution).