Development of Partial Volume Segmentation of Brain Tissue Based on Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)

Seiji Kumazawa¹, Takashi Yoshiura², Hiroshi Honda², Fukai Toyofuku¹, Yoshiharu Higashida¹

To study the cortical/subcortical diffusivity in neurological diseases, brain tissue segmentation methods based on DTI data have been proposed. However, a partial volume effect might complicate the segmentation. We present a brain tissue segmentation method based on DTI data. The features of our method include the conducting of the segmentation in DTI space without any registration, and the estimation of the partial volume fractions of each tissue type within a voxel using a maximum a posteriori probability principle. The results of the digital phantom experiment and human DTI data demonstrate that our method was able to perform a reasonable segmentation for brain tissue on DTI data.