Abstract
Quantitative investigations of fiber orientation and structural connectivity at microscopic resolution have led to great challenges for current neuroimaging techniques. Here, we present a structure tensor (ST) analysis of ex vivo rat brain images acquired by a multicontrast (MC) serial optical coherence scanner. The ST considers the gradients of images in local neighbors to generate a matrix whose eigen-decomposition can estimate the local features such as the edges, anisotropy, and orientation of tissue constituents. This computational analysis is applied on the conventional- and polarization-based contrasts of optical coherence tomography. The three-dimensional (3-D) fiber orientation maps are computed from the image stacks of sequential scans both at mesoresolution for a global view and at high-resolution for the details. The computational orientation maps demonstrate a good agreement with the optic axis orientation contrast which measures the in-plane fiber orientation. Moreover, tractography is implemented using the directional information extracted from the 3-D ST. The study provides a unique opportunity to leverage MC high-resolution information to map structural connectivity of the whole brain.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 036003 |
Journal | Journal of biomedical optics |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.
Keywords
- connectivity
- diffusion tensor imaging
- fiber orientation
- optical coherence tomography
- polarization
- structure tensor