Fuzzy Nonparametric DTI Segmentation for Robust Cingulum-Tract Extraction

This paper presents a novel segmentation-based approach for fiber-tract extraction in diffusion-tensor (DT) images. Typical tractography methods, incorporating thresholds on fractional anisotropy and fiber curvature to terminate tracking, can face serious problems arising from partial voluming and noise. For these reasons, tractography often fails to extract thin tracts with sharp changes in orientation, e.g. the

cingulum

. Unlike tractography—which disregards the information in the tensors that were previously tracked—the proposed method extracts the cingulum by exploiting the statistical coherence of tensors in the entire structure. Moreover, the proposed segmentation-based method allows

fuzzy

class memberships to optimally extract information within partial-volumed voxels. Unlike typical fuzzy-segmentation schemes employing Gaussian models that are biased towards ellipsoidal clusters, the proposed method

models the manifolds

underlying the classes by incorporating nonparametric data-driven statistical models. Furthermore, it exploits the nonparametric model to capture the

spatial continuity and structure

of the fiber bundle. The results on real DT images demonstrate that the proposed method extracts the cingulum bundle significantly more accurately as compared to tractography.