Apparent diffusion coefficients from high angular resolution diffusion imaging: Estimation and applications

High angular resolution diffusion imaging has recently been of great interest in characterizing non-Gaussian diffusion processes. One important goal is to obtain more accurate fits of the apparent diffusion processes in these non-Gaussian regions, thus overcoming the limitations of classical diffusion tensor imaging. This paper presents an extensive study of high-order models for apparent diffusion coefficient estimation and illustrates some of their applications. Using a meaningful modified spherical harmonics basis to capture the physical constraints of the problem, a new regularization algorithm is proposed. The new smoothing term is based on the Laplace-Beltrami operator and its closed form implementation is used in the fitting procedure. Next, the linear transformation between the coefficients of a spherical harmonic series of order e and independent elements of a rank-e high-order diffusion tensor is explicitly derived. This relation allows comparison of the state-of-the-art anisotropy measures computed from spherical harmonics and tensor coefficients. Published results are reproduced accurately and it is also possible to recover voxels with isotropic, single fiber anisotropic, and multiple fiber anisotropic diffusion. Validation is performed on apparent diffusion coefficients from synthetic data, from a biological phantom, and from a human brain dataset.