Towards Image-Dependent Safety Hulls for Fiber Tracking

Sebastiano Barbieri¹, Jan Klein¹, Christopher Nimsky², Horst K. Hahn¹

We make use of a DTI software model in order to systematically analyze the influence of noise, fiber bundle diameter, number of seed points and tensor anisotropy on the magnitude of fiber tracking errors. In our model we simulate image noise and partial volume artifacts. As a measure for fiber tracking errors we introduce a so called "safety radius". The safety radius is used to construct safety hulls, which are tubes that surround the tracked fibers and indicate their margin of error. We further analyze how fibers are spatially distributed inside a cylindrical fiber bundle during the tracking process.