A unified framework for estimating diffusion tensors of any order with symmetric positive-definite constraints
by Barmpoutis, A. | Vemuri,B. C.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, April 14-17, 2010, pp. 1385-1388. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISBI.2010.5490256
Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, April 14-17, 2010, pp. 1385-1388. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISBI.2010.5490256
Description
Cartesian tensors of various orders have been employed for either modeling the diffusivity or the orientation distribution function in Diffusion-Weighted MRI datasets. In both cases, the estimated tensors have to be positive-definite since they model positive-valued functions. In this paper we present a novel unified framework for estimating positive-definite tensors of any order, in contrast to the existing methods in literature, which are either order-specific or fail to handle the positive-definite property. The proposed framework employs a homogeneous polynomial parametrization that covers the full space of any order positive-definite tensors and explicitly imposes the positive-definite constraint on the estimated tensors. We show that this parametrization leads to a linear system that is solved using the non-negative least squares technique. The framework is demonstrated using synthetic and real data from an excised rat hippocampus.
