MICCAI 2008 Diffusion MRI Tutorial: Technology trends and unsolved problems

The processing and analysis of diffusion weighted imaging data, is a task considered to be very challenging due to the complex underlying properties of the data, but is becoming more mature owing to major new research contributions from various fields like physics, mathematics, statistics, computing and visualization. Prompted by its growing contribution to disease investigation, there has been an increased interest in addressing the mathematical and technical issues associated with the analysis of such data, by development of sophisticated techniques for the same – a trend that is evident in recent research. These fundamental issues were discussed as part of the diffusion tutorial Advances in Diffusion MRI Analysis, Miccai 2007.

The increase in DWI being added to clinical studies, leading to large amounts of data being acquired and needing analysis, underlines the crucial need for a common protocol in handling processing, analysis and quality control of data. This tutorial proposes to address these advanced issues of standardization and comparability in different aspects of diffusion imaging: reconstruction, modeling, quality analysis of acquired data, registration, statistics and fiber tracking, across different research groups.

The talks and the subsequent panel discussion (Program) aim to provide researchers with an advanced and comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in all facets of DWI data: its acquisition, processing, analysis and application to clinical data as well as elucidate issues of standardization and comparability of the processing and analysis (Motivation). Potential candidates are graduate students, postdoctoral students, computational researchers and clinically oriented researchers who have a basic idea of diffusion and would like to get a deeper insight into understanding the properties of the data and appropriate methodological framework to be applied to this data. Literature relevant to the talks can be found here.

Organizers

Ragini Verma, PhD
Section of Biomedical Image Analysis, Dept. of Radiology
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
ragini.verma(at)uphs.upenn.edu

Peter J. Basser, PhD
Chief, Section of Tissue Biophysics & Biomimetics, NIH/NICHD/LIMB
pjbasser(at)helix.nih.gov

Carl-Fredrik Westin, PhD
Director, Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging (LMI)
Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston
westin(at)bwh.harvard.edu

Rachid Deriche, PhD
Research Director, INRIA
Odyssee Project Team
INRIA Sophia Antipolis - Mediterranee Research Center. France
Rachid.Deriche(at)sophia.inria.fr