Clustering Fiber Traces Using Normalized Cuts

Brun A, Knutsson H, Park HJ, Shenton ME, Westin CF

Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv 2004 Sep;3216/2004(3216):368-375

PMID: 20209048

Abstract

In this paper we present a framework for unsupervised segmentation of white matter fiber traces obtained from diffusion weighted MRI data. Fiber traces are compared pairwise to create a weighted undirected graph which is partitioned into coherent sets using the normalized cut (N cut) criterion. A simple and yet effective method for pairwise comparison of fiber traces is presented which in combination with the N cut criterion is shown to produce plausible segmentations of both synthetic and real fiber trace data. Segmentations are visualized as colored stream-tubes or transformed to a segmentation of voxel space, revealing structures in a way that looks promising for future explorative studies of diffusion weighted MRI data.