Figure 1: An illustration
of the links between high value diffusion-weighted data, Funk-Radon
transform, diffusion ODF, and fiber ODF: the slice cuts the corpus callosum,
whose fibers approximately follow the direction. The figure proposes the
aligned T1- and T2-weighted slices and a number of diffusion-weighted slices.
When the diffusion gradient is not orthogonal to the fibers (unit vector under
corresponding slice), most of the MR signal is destroyed by water diffusion:
the corpus callosum is black (row of slices at the bottom). When the diffusion
gradient is orthogonal to the fibers, water diffusion is restricted by the
axonal membranes: some noisy signal survives in the corpus callosum. Hence, the
sum of the raw signal along the equator around the axis leads to a peak of
the -ball indicating the fiber direction. In this figure, the -balls.
are scaled according to their anisotropy.