Probabilistic Clustering and Quantitative Analysis of White Matter Fiber Tracts

Mahnaz Maddah, William M. Wells III, Simon K. Warfield, C.-F. Westin, W. Eric L. Grimson
Information Processing in Medical Imaging: 20th International Conference (IPMI 2007)
Volume 20, Pages 372-383
July, 2007

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Abstract

A novel framework for joint clustering and point-by-point mapping of white matter fiber pathways is presented. Accurate clus- tering of the trajectories into fiber bundles requires point correspon- dence along the fiber pathways determined. This knowledge is also crucial for any tract-oriented quantitative analysis. We employ an expectation- maximization (EM) algorithm to cluster the trajectories in a Gamma mixture model context. The result of clustering is the probabilistic as- signment of the fiber trajectories to each cluster, an estimate of the clus- ter parameters, and point correspondences. Point-by-point correspon- dence of the trajectories within a bundle is obtained by constructing a distance map and a label map from each cluster center at every iteration of the EM algorithm. This offers a time-efficient alternative to pairwise curve matching of all trajectories with respect to each cluster center. Probabilistic assignment of the trajectories to clusters is controlled by imposing a minimum threshold on the membership probabilities, to re- move outliers in a principled way. The presented results confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework for quantitative analysis of diffusion tensor MRI.

About 3000 trajectories clustered to 25 user-initialized bundles. Clusters in- clude different segments of the corpus callosum, tapetum, middle cerebellar peduncle, corticobulbar and corticospinal tracts, and different portions of thalamic radiation.

Reference

Maddah M, III WMW, Warfield SK, Westin CF, Grimson WEL. Probabilistic clustering and quantitative analysis of white matter fiber tracts. In Information Processing in Medical Imaging: 20th International Conference (IPMI 2007), volume 20 of Inf Process Med Imaging. Kerkrade, The Netherlands, 2007;372-383.

Bibtex entry

@InProceedings{maddahIPMI07,
  author         = "Mahnaz Maddah and William M. Wells III and Simon K.        
                   Warfield and Carl-Fredrik Westin and W. Eric L. Grimson",   
  title          = "Probabilistic Clustering and Quantitative Analysis of White
                   Matter Fiber Tracts",                                       
  booktitle      = "Information Processing in Medical Imaging: 20th            
                   International Conference (IPMI 2007)",                      
  month          = {July},                                                     
  year           = "2007",                                                     
  series         = {Inf Process Med Imaging},                                  
  volume         = {20},                                                       
  pages          = {372--383},                                                 
  address        = "Kerkrade, The Netherlands", }

Grants

NSF ITR-0426558, NMSS RG-3478A2, NIH R21-MH67054, NIH R01-RR021885, NIH P41-RR13218 (NAC), NIH U54-EB005149 (NAMIC), CIMIT