Estimation of Anatomical Connection Strength in Diffusion MRI Tractography by a Global Message-Passing Algorithm

Milos Ivkovic¹, Ashish Raj²

This paper addresses an important problem in difussion weighted MRI tractography -anatomical strength of reconstructed fiber tracts. The developed method incorporates information on the amount of white matter in voxels (small regions of brain) with diffusion data and estimates structural strength of fibers globally, by considering all the fibers and all the voxels simultaneously. We achieve this by using a message-passing optimization procedure, specially tailored for this problem, that operates on a bipartite graph with nodes corresponding to fibers and voxels.