Diffusion configuration of water molecules in diffusion weighted imaging

In the studying of fibers microstructure of brain white matter, many reconstruction methods have been proposed to interpret the diffusion-weighted signal. Those methods can be categorized into model-based and model-free methods. In this paper, the diffusion configuration of water molecules are discussed, and two questions are put forward to analyze the performance of the current algorithms about diffusion configuration. The first question is what the diffusion profile looks like in voxel? The second question is what is the location of fibers in a voxel? As a result, firstly, most of model-based algorithms ignore much information coming from the isotropic diffusion, which will lead to an inaccurate estimation. Secondly, model-free algorithms just provide direction information of fibers, ignore or cannot provide location information of fibers. So unfortunately, neither model-based methods nor model-free methods can resolve those two questions very well. How to resolve those questions is still an open problem, and it may be an interesting direction in the future research. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.