Potential Biomarkers From Positive Definite 4th Order Tensors In Hardi

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a framework to evaluate new scalar quantities for higher order tensors (HOT) appearing in high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI). These can potentially serve as biomarkers. It involves flattening of HOTs and extraction of the diagonal D-components. Experiments performed in the 4th order case reveal that D-components encode geometric information unlike the isometric 6D 2nd order Voigt form. The existing invariants obtained from the Voigt form are considered for comparison. We also notice that D-components can be useful in segmentation of white matter structures in crossing regions and classification. Results on phantom and the synthetic dataset support the conclusions.