Abstract.
High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) permits the computation of water molecule displacement probabilities over a sphere of possible displacement directions. This probability is often re- ferred to as the orientation distribution function (ODF). In this paper we present a novel model for the diffusion ODF namely, a mixture of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions. Our model is compact in that it requires very few variables to model complicated ODF geometries which occur specifically in the presence of heterogeneous nerve fiber orienta- tion. We also present a Riemannian geometric framework for computing intrinsic distances, in closed-form, and performing interpolation between ODFs represented by vMF mixtures. As an example, we apply the intrin- sic distance within a hidden Markov measure field segmentation scheme. We present results of this segmentation for HARDI images of rat spinal cords – which show distinct regions within both the white and gray mat- ter. It should be noted that such a fine level of parcellation of the gray and white matter cannot be obtained either from contrast MRI scans or Diffusion Tensor MRI scans. We validate the segmentation algorithm by applying it to synthetic data sets where the ground truth is known.