Probabilistic tractography using Q-ball modeling and particle filtering.

By assuming that orientation information of brain white matter fibers can be inferred from Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DWMRI) measurements, tractography algorithms provide an estimation of the brain connectivity in-vivo. The two key ingredients of tractography are the diffusion model (tensor, high-order tensor, Q-ball, etc.) and the way to deal with uncertainty during the tracking process (deterministic vs probabilistic). In this paper, we investigate the use of an analytical Q-ball model for the diffusion data within a well-formalized particle filtering framework. The proposed method is validated and compared to other tracking algorithms on the MICCAI'09 contest Fiber Cup phantom and on in-vivo brain DWMRI data.