Elliptic fourier features of brain white matter pathways

Magnetic resonance imaging provides diffusion weighted images (DMRI), which non-invasively reconstruct the brain white matter pathways. DMRI is used to study brain white matter diseases as well as aid surgical planning. As localization of different white matter pathways surrounding a pathology is crucial for surgical planning, automatic extraction and classification of different anatomical white matter pathways pre-operatively becomes an important computational tool. In this paper, we propose a method for classification of brain white matter pathways based on 3D elliptic Fourier descriptors, which are extended from the 2D elliptic Fourier descriptors. We performed experiments and validation of the proposed method on a white matter atlas space and on real pathological cases.