Large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping of orientation distribution functions.

We propose a novel large deformation diffeomorphic registration algorithm to align high angular resolution diffusion images (HARDI) characterized by Orientation Distribution Functions (ODF). Our proposed algorithm seeks an optimal diffeomorphism of large deformation between two ODF fields in a spatial volume domain and at the same time, locally reorients an ODF in a manner such that it remains consistent with the surrounding anatomical structure. We first extend ODFs traditionally defined in a unit sphere to a generalized ODF defined in R3. This makes it easy for an affine transformation as well as a diffeomorphic group action to be applied on the ODF. We then construct a Riemannian space of the generalized ODFs and incorporate its Riemannian metric for the similarity of ODFs into a variational problem defined under the large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) framework. We finally derive the gradient of the cost function in both Riemannian spaces of diffeomorphisms and the generalized ODFs, and present its numerical implementation. Both synthetic and real brain HARDI data are used to illustrate the performance of our registration algorithm.