Diffusion Model-based FOD Restoration from High Distortion in dMRI
This addresses the problem of reliable fiber tracking and connectivity analysis in brain regions affected by imaging artifacts for medical imaging researchers and clinicians, representing a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of corrupted fiber orientation distributions (FODs) in diffusion MRI due to susceptibility-induced distortion, which hinders fiber tracking in brain regions like the brain stem, by proposing a novel diffusion model that restores FODs with high accuracy, as demonstrated by reduced root mean square errors and angular errors on a test set with ground truth (n=43) and improved tractography performance on a larger test set with distortion (n=1172).
Fiber orientation distributions (FODs) is a popular model to represent the diffusion MRI (dMRI) data. However, imaging artifacts such as susceptibility-induced distortion in dMRI can cause signal loss and lead to the corrupted reconstruction of FODs, which prohibits successful fiber tracking and connectivity analysis in affected brain regions such as the brain stem. Generative models, such as the diffusion models, have been successfully applied in various image restoration tasks. However, their application on FOD images poses unique challenges since FODs are 4-dimensional data represented by spherical harmonics (SPHARM) with the 4-th dimension exhibiting order-related dependency. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion model for FOD restoration that can recover the signal loss caused by distortion artifacts. We use volume-order encoding to enhance the ability of the diffusion model to generate individual FOD volumes at all SPHARM orders. Moreover, we add cross-attention features extracted across all SPHARM orders in generating every individual FOD volume to capture the order-related dependency across FOD volumes. We also condition the diffusion model with low-distortion FODs surrounding high-distortion areas to maintain the geometric coherence of the generated FODs. We trained and tested our model using data from the UK Biobank (n = 1315). On a test set with ground truth (n = 43), we demonstrate the high accuracy of the generated FODs in terms of root mean square errors of FOD volumes and angular errors of FOD peaks. We also apply our method to a test set with large distortion in the brain stem area (n = 1172) and demonstrate the efficacy of our method in restoring the FOD integrity and, hence, greatly improving tractography performance in affected brain regions.