Harmonic analysis of spherical sampling in diffusion MRI

Understand

In the last decade diffusion MRI has become a powerful tool to non-invasively study white-matter integrity in the brain.

• Recently many research groups have focused their attention on multi-shell spherical acquisitions with the aim of effectively mapping the diffusion signal with a lower number of q-space samples, hence enabling a crucial reduction of acquisition time.
• One of the quantities commonly studied in this context is the so-called orientation distribution function (ODF).
• In this setting, the spherical harmonic (SH) transform has gained a great deal of popularity thanks to its ability to perform convolution operations efficiently and accurately, such as the Funk-Radon transform notably required for ODF computation from q-space data.