Evaluation of Bayesian tensor estimation using tensor coherence

Fiber tractography, a unique and non-invasive method to estimate axonal fibers within white matter, constructs the putative streamlines from diffusion tensor MRI by interconnecting voxels according to the propagation direction defined by the diffusion tensor. This direction has uncertainties due to the properties of underlying fiber bundles, neighboring structures and image noise. Therefore, robust estimation of the diffusion direction is essential to reconstruct reliable fiber pathways. For this purpose, we propose a tensor estimation method using a Bayesian framework, which includes an a priori probability distribution based on tensor coherence indices, to utilize both the neighborhood direction information and the inertia moment as regularization terms. The reliability of the proposed tensor estimation was evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations in terms of accuracy and precision with four synthetic tensor fields at various SNRs and in vivo human data of brain and calf muscle. Proposed Bayesian estimation demonstrated the relative robustness to noise and the higher reliability compared to the simple tensor regression.