Research Article

Crossing Fibers Detection with an Analytical High Order Tensor Decomposition

Algorithm 1

Data: Diffusion signal ; acquisition parameters
; vectors sampling the unit sphere.
Result: The unique coefficients of the symmetric
positive definite tensor CT-FOD.
(1) Modeling the FOD function by symmetric
cartesian tensor of order and dimension 3.
                       (i)
  with the coefficients of the tensor, and
   the components of the gradient
  vector .
 To impose the positivity constraint, the homogeneous
 polynomial of order in 3 variables, is
 re-parameterized by a sum of squares of polynomials
 of order according to the Ternary quartics
 theorem [8], we notice that in our work :
                       (ii)
 with real and positive weights; vectors
 containing the coefficients of the order rank-1
 polynomials constructed from the unit vectors
sampling the unit sphere.
(2) By substituting given by (ii) in
(2), the signal can be approximated by
as following:
        (iii)
is constructed for each vector or rank-1
 tensor , , sampling the unit sphere, and
 contains the coefficients of these symmetric fourth
 order tensors. The unknowns are then the weights
; the values are simply obtained by minimizing
 the following functional equation E:
   (iv)
 with , and normalized.
 To ensure the positivity of the values,
 the problem (iv) is solved using the efficient
 constrained optimization algorithm Non Negative
 Least Squares (NNLS) [8, 15].
(3) The coefficients of the FOD tensor are
then estimated simply by multiplying the matrix ,
of size containing the monomials of the rank-1
symmetric fourth order tensor formed from vectors
, by the resultant vector of length .