Yuliya Kupriyanova1, Oleg Posnansky2,
N. J. Shah2,3
1Medical Imaging Physics, Institute of
Neuroscience and Medicine - 4, Forschungzentrum Juelich, Juelich, Germany; 2Medical
Imaging Physics, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine - 4 ,
Forschungzentrum Juelich, Juelich, Germany; 3Department of
Neurology, Faculty of Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
Imperfections
in the diffusion-weighted (DW) gradients may cause errors in the estimation
of diffusion parameters. We present results demonstrating the influence of
these errors in the accuracy of fibre orientation density function (ODF)
estimation. A DW gradient calibration scheme, used to mitigate DW gradient
errors, is also described. We compared the reconstructed fibre ODFs from two
datasets, acquired in vivo with and without the application of the
calibration scheme and calculated the statistical efficiency of the unbiased
fibre ODF estimators for these datasets. It is shown that the calibration
procedure can significantly improve results of the fibre ODF estimation.