Denoising of Brain DW-MR Data by Single and Multiple Diffusion Kernels

Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging is widely used to study the structure ofthe fiber pathways of white matter in the brain. However, the recovered axon orientationscan be prone to error because of the low signal to noise ratio. Spatial regularization canreduce the error, but it must be done carefully so that real spatial information is not removedand false orientations are not introduced. In this paper we investigate the advantagesof applying an anisotropic filter based on single and multiple axon bundle orientation kernels.To this end, we compute local diffusion kernels based on Diffusion Tensor and multiDiffusion Tensor models. We show the benefits of our approach to three different types ofDW-MRI data: synthetic, in vivo human, and acquired from a diffusion phantom.