Maximum energy tracking approach to reconstructing human cardiac fibers from DTI

Fiber tracking plays an essential role in cardiac diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI). Most conventional fiber tracking studies are based on using main eigenvectors for tracking fibers. These approaches do not account for enough uncertainties caused by noise or other artifacts present in DTI images. We propose a novel maximum energy fiber tracking approach which consists in constructing an energy field from ex-vivo cardiac DTI images and estimating its influence on final fiber orientation. The theory for estimating the global energy to find final fiber tracts is formulated, and new criteria are defined to assess fiber tracking performance. The results show the proposed approach can reduce disturbance, decrease wrong paths and overcome influence from partial volume effects that may easily block the fiber tracking process in principal diffusion direction (PDD) approaches.