Mesoskopic Tracking of White Matter Fibers in the Human Brain

• Applicant: Professor Valerij Kiselev, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Medical Physics, Biomedical Technology
• Term: from 2009 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 151062073

• Final Report Year: 2019

Final Report Abstract

This project was aimed at finding properties of different cellular species inside the living human brain using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sensitized to the thermal motion (diffusion) of water molecules. The first goal was to find the long-distance connections inside the brain realized by axons, which are very long processes of neural cells carrying their output signals to other cells. The competition-winning method known as the global fiber tracking (or global tractography) was an extension of previous method to better reflect the realistic biophysical properties of axons. The second part of this project aimed at determination further properties of axons and the embedding tissue beyond their spatial configuration. The research focus was on the volume fractions of cellular compartments and the intensity of water diffusion within them. Such information has been unavailable before due to the spatial resolution of MRI, which is two – three orders of magnitude coarser than the typical cell size. Therefore, the signals from individual compartments are well mixed in the overall MRI signal. Disentangling these contributions became possible within this project due to developed theoretical modeling of the MRI signal formation and advanced information processing. Initially motivated by the need to improve the accuracy of fiber tracking, the developed methods have a high potential for fundamental and clinical research. Accessing parameters of specific cell populations rather that the overall tissue-averaged metrics can provide for more specific and sensitive biomarkers of pathologies serving earlier and more differential diagnostic in medicine. In particular, the preliminary results of this project show a sharper delineation of the infarct core in ischemic stroke and demonstrate a complicated pattern of tissue change in glioma, a common brain tumor type.

Publications

• Fiber continuity: An anisotropic prior for ODF estimation. IEEE Transactions on medical imaging, 30 (2011) 1274–1283
  Marco Reisert and Valerij G. Kiselev
  
• Global fiber reconstruction becomes practical. NeuroImage 54 (2011) 955–962
  Marco Reisert, Irina Mader, Constantin Anastasopoulos, Matthias Weigel, Susanne Schnell, Valerij Kiselev
  
• About the geometry of asymmetric fiber orientation distributions. IEEE Transactions on medical imaging, 31 (2012) 1240–1249
  Marco Reisert, Elias Kellner, and Valerij G. Kiselev
  
• Fiber Density Estimation by Tensor Divergence. In: Ayache N., Delingette H., Golland P., Mori K. (eds) Medical Image Computing and Computer- Assisted Intervention MICCAI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7511. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
  Marco Reisert, Henrik Skibbe, Valerij G. Kiselev
  
• Fiber density estimation from single q-shell diffusion imaging by tensor divergence. NeuroImage 77 (2013) 16–176
  Marco Reisert, Irina Mader, Roza Umarova, Simon Maier, Ludger Tebartz van Elst, Valerij G. Kiselev
  
• Global tracking in human gliomas: a comparison with established tracking methods. Clin Neuroradiol 23 (2013) 263–275
  T. Nguyen-Thanh, M. Reisert, C. Anastasopoulos, F. Hamzei, T. Reithmeier, M.S. Vry, V.G. Kiselev, A. Weyerbrock, and I. Mader
  
• Attention-network specific alterations of structural connectivity in the undamaged white matter in acute neglect. Human Bran Mapping 35 (2014) 4678–4692
  Roza M. Umarova, Marco Reisert, Tanja-Ute Beier, Valerij G. Kiselev, Stefan Kloppel, Christoph P. Kaller, Volkmar Glauche, Irina Mader, Lena Beume, Jurgen Hennig, Cornelius Weiller
  
• Local and global fiber tractography in patients with epilepsy. American Journal of Neuroradiology 35 (2014) 291–296
  C. Anastasopoulos, M. Reisert, V.G. Kiselev, T. Nguyen-Thanh, A. Schulze-Bonhage, J. Zentner and I. Mader
  
• MesoFT: unifying diffusion modelling and fiber tracking. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. vol. 17 (2014) 201–208
  Marco Reisert, Valerij G. Kiselev, Bibek Dhital, Elias Kellner and Dmitry S. Novikov
  
• Model-free Global Tractography. Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 24 (2016) 2038
  Henrik Skibbe, Elias Kellner, Valerij G Kiselev, and Marco Reisert
  
• Disentangling micro from mesostructure by diffusion MRI: A Bayesian approach. NeuroImage, 147 (2017) 964–975
  Marco Reisert, Elias Kellner, Bibek Dhital, Valerij G. Kiselev
  
• On modeling. Magn Reson Med 79 (2018) 3172–3193
  Dmitry S. Novikov, Valerij G. Kiselev, Sune N. Jespersen