Spherical HARMonics INteractive GPU-based (SHARMING) tools for fused DTI/HARDI visualization

Introduction The recent diffusion weighted MRI (DW-MRI) technique High Angular To surpass these cumbersome drawbacks, we present a novel, multiResolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) overcomes some of the decisive limitations of its predecessor Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) that appear in the areas of composite nerve fiber structure (Figure 1). field, medical visualization framework that adopts the benefits of both DTI and HARDI. We automatically choose the most suitable model per imaging voxel by applying a classification scheme based on several However, one has to keep in mind all the drawbacks that come along: complex modeling of the data, visual cluttering, nonintuitive and HARDI anisotropy measures calculated from different spherical harmonics based HARDI modeling techniques (Apparent Diffusion computationally heavy visualization, as well as, the inability to interactively explore and transform the data. Coefficient (ADC), QBall and Diffusion Orientation Transform (DOT)). To accomplish fast and interactive visualization, we exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs for glyph rendering, and adopt DTI fiber tracking in suitable regions, thus, providing intuitive visualization for the users. The resulting interactive, multi-field framework, allows a) b)