RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Freewater EstimatoR using iNtErpolated iniTialization (FERNET): Toward Accurate Estimation of Free Water in Peritumoral Region Using Single-Shell Diffusion MRI Data
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 796615
DO 10.1101/796615
A1 Abdol Aziz Ould Ismail
A1 Drew Parker
A1 Moises Hernandez-Fernandez
A1 Ronald Wolf
A1 Steven Brem
A1 Simon Alexander
A1 Wes Hodges
A1 Ofer Pasternak
A1 Emmanuel Caruyer
A1 Ragini Verma
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/08/796615.abstract
AB Characterization of healthy versus pathological tissue is a key concern when modeling tissue microstructure in the peritumoral area, confounded by the presence of free water (e.g., edema). Most methods that model tissue microstructure are either based on advanced acquisition schemes not readily available in the clinic, or are not designed to address the challenge of edema. This underscores the need for a robust free water elimination (FWE) method that estimates free water in pathological tissue but can be used with clinically prevalent single-shell diffusion tensor imaging data. FWE in single-shell data requires the fitting of a bi-compartment model, which is an ill-posed problem. Its solution requires optimization, which relies on an initialization step. We propose a novel initialization approach for FWE, FERNET, which improves the estimation of free water in edematous and infiltrated peritumoral regions, using single-shell diffusion MRI data. The method has been extensively investigated on simulated data and healthy and brain tumor datasets, demonstrating its applicability on clinically acquired data. Additionally, it has been applied to data from brain tumor patients to demonstrate the improvement in tractography in the peritumoral region.