Unique planar color coding of fiber bundles and its application to fiber integrity quantification

We present a new color coding paradigm of fiber bundle orientation obtained from diffusion tensor imaging. The color coding is defined with respect to an arbitrary projection plane, which can be automatically adjusted in order to minimize the local ambiguity of the coding. It is demonstrated at the internal capsule that different fiber bundle orientations coded by the new color coding are well distinguished by different colors while with conventional color coding different orientations have the same color. Furthermore, the reliable delineation of particular fiber bundles using this new color coding approach enables robust quantification of fiber integrity. In this context diffusion properties inside particular fiber bundles are determined automatically by estimating the parameters of a probabilistic mixture model including partial volume effects.