Deterministic and Probabilistic Tractography Based on Complex Fibre Orientation Distributions

We propose an integral concept for tractography to describe crossing and splitting fibre bundles based on the fibre orientation distribution function (ODF) estimated from high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI). We show that in order to perform accurate probabilistic tractography, one needs to use a fibre ODF estimation and not the diffusion ODF. We use a new fibre ODF estimation obtained from a sharpening deconvolution transform (SDT) of the diffusion ODF reconstructed from q-ball imaging (QBI). This SDT provides new insight into the relationship between the HARDI signal, the diffusion ODF, and the fibre ODF. We demonstrate that the SDT agrees with classical spherical deconvolution and improves the…