A multi-shell self-calibrating Richardson-Lucy deconvolution approach for the simultaneous quantification of ODF and tissue properties of different diffusion domains in the kidneys.

The advent of multi-shell diffusion MRI (dMRI) offers a viable substrate to apply deconvolution profiles in tissues characterized by partial volume of multiple diffusion domains, as the kidneys. In this work we present a modified damped Richardson-Lucy (mdRL) algorithm to perform spherical deconvolution over multiple diffusion domains. This method does not need to define a prior response function, which is dynamically estimated for each voxel, and allows to compute a fiber orientation distribution as well as relevant scalar metrics, as mean diffusivity and fractional anisotropy, for each diffusion domain. Applicability on two sample datasets is demonstrated as proof of concept.