EMBC 2010 Trends in High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging and Clinical Applications

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. There is also an increase in DWI being added to clinical studies, leading to large amounts of data being acquired, needing analysis. This underlines the crucial need for a common protocol in handling processing, analysis and quality control of data. The tutorial proposes to address the challenging issues of standardization and comparability in different aspects of diffusion imaging: reconstruction, quality analysis of acquired data, registration, statistics/regression and tracking, across different research groups. The talks and the subsequent panel discussion would present the state-of-the-art as well as build towards a "protocol" that can be directly applied, for any/several of these tasks. As this is the first time of this tutorial in EMBC 2010, the focus will be mainly on introductory material but without disregarding the latest developments in the area. More specifically we plan to cover the following material:

• Modeling the diffusion MRI signal
• Recovering microstructural indices
• Fiber crossings and high angular resolution methods
• Tractography
• Connectivity mapping
• Tract-based analysis and statistics
• Inference and classification
• Applications

Organizers

Demian Wassermann, PhD
Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging (LMI)
Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (PNL)
Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL)
Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, USA
demian(at)bwh.harvard.edu

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