International Patent application publication WO 2005/076030 A1 discloses the reconstruction of an object dataset from the magnetic resonance signals in which apparent diffusion coefficients are assigned. The occurrence of one single or several diffusion directions is identified for different voxels, in order to take account of crossing fibers. The method being voxel oriented, it does not suggest or imply to employ voxel-spanning information.
US Patent Application Publication US 2006/0165308 A1 discloses a neighborhood relevance component that considers diffusion tensor matrices from neighboring pixels or voxels. The neighborhood relevance component is modeled as a Markov Random Field. Also this approach is voxel-oriented, because it assumes some kind of correlation between the diffusion data of neighboring voxels. However, this correlation can become rather weak due to strong noise.
The known apparatuses and methods reconstruct fiber tracts using microscopic information. Therefore, they are susceptible to noise, partial voluming and other imaging artifacts. There is a need for a robust apparatus and a corresponding method that is less influenced by imperfections of the dataset.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds