Mitk-di

Diffusion-MRI provides a unique window on brain anatomy and insights into aspects of brain structure in living humans that could not be studied previously. There is a major effort in this rapidly evolving field of research to develop algorithms that provide detailed information on the white matter fibre architecture and disorders in the brain. High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) provides an extraordinarily high level of detail, including entire manifolds of information at each voxel. The lack of standardized software tools for data I/O, model reconstruction, interactive visualization, feature extraction and statistics impedes development and sustainable evaluation in HARDI research. In this paper, a new toolkit component of the Medical Imaging and Interaction Toolkit (MITK), MITK-DI, is presented and its features are summarized at each stage of the pipeline from raw data processing to comprehensive statistics. MITK-DI aims at integrating novel diffusion imaging techniques into the MITK toolkit to provide a comprehensive software framework for performant data processing, analysis and interactive visualization. An examplary application of the framework is shown using phantom and in-vivo datasets from a clinical MR scanner. Visualizations are presented that reveal details for which there would be no direct way to appreciate using conventional display of scalaror RGBimages.