Confocal histology provides an opportunity to establish intra-voxel fiber orientation distributions that can be used to quantitatively assess the biological relevance of diffusion-weighted MRI models, e.g., constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD). Here, we apply deep learning to investigate the potential of single shell diffusion-weighted MRI to explain histologically observed fiber orientation distributions (FOD) and compare the derived deep learning model with a leading CSD approach. This study (1) demonstrates that there exists additional information in the diffusion signal that is not currently exploited by CSD, and (2) provides an illustrative data-driven model that makes use of this information.
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