title: Visualization of Brain Microstructure Through Spherical Harmonics Illumination of High Fidelity Spatio-Angular Fields.
abstract: Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) is gaining rapid adoption in the medical imaging community due to its ability to measure the non-Gaussian property of water diffusion in biological tissues. Compared to traditional diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), DKI can provide additional details about the underlying microstructural characteristics of the neural tissues. It has shown promising results in studies on changes in gray matter and mild traumatic brain injury where DTI is often found to be inadequate. The DKI dataset, which has high-fidelity spatio-angular fields, is difficult to visualize. Glyph-based visualization techniques are commonly used for visualization of DTI datasets; however, due to the rapid changes in orientation, lighting, and occlusion, visually analyzing the much more higher fidelity DKI data is a challenge. In this paper, we provide a systematic way to manage, analyze, and visualize high-fidelity spatio-angular fields from DKI datasets, by using spherical harmonics lighting functions to facilitate insights into the brain microstructure.
authors.affiliation: University of Maryland, College Park.
authors.forename: Sujal
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bista
authors.affiliation: University of Maryland School of Medicine at Baltimore.
authors.forename: Jiachen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhuo
authors.affiliation: University of Maryland School of Medicine at Baltimore.
authors.forename: Rao P
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Gullapalli
authors.affiliation: University of Maryland, College Park.
authors.forename: Amitabh
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Varshney
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000473:pathology; D056324:Diffusion Tensor Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*