Improved global cardiac tractography with simulated annealing

We propose a new fibre tracking algorithm for cardiac DT-MRI that parts with the locally ¿greedy¿ paradigm intrinsic to conventional tracking algorithms. We formulate the fibre tracking problem as the global problem of computing paths in a Boolean-weighted undirected graph. Each voxel is a vertex and edges connect every pair of neighboring voxels. We solve the underlying optimization task by Metropolis type annealing. The key features of our approach are: global optimality (unlike conventional tracking algorithms) and optimal balance between the density of fibres and the amount of available data. Besides, seed points are no longer needed; fibres are predicted in one shot for the whole DT-MRI volume without initialization artifacts.