Reconstruct with Diffusion Spectrum Imaging

We show how to apply Diffusion Spectrum Imaging [Wedeen08] to diffusion MRI datasets of Cartesian keyhole diffusion gradients.

First import the necessary modules:

from dipy.data import fetch_taiwan_ntu_dsi, read_taiwan_ntu_dsi, get_sphere
from dipy.reconst.dsi import DiffusionSpectrumModel

Download and read the data for this tutorial.

fetch_taiwan_ntu_dsi()
img, gtab = read_taiwan_ntu_dsi()

img contains a nibabel Nifti1Image object (data) and gtab contains a GradientTable object (gradient information e.g. b-values). For example to read the b-values it is possible to write print(gtab.bvals).

Load the raw diffusion data and the affine.

data = img.get_data()
print('data.shape (%d, %d, %d, %d)' % data.shape)

data.shape (96, 96, 60, 203)

This dataset has anisotropic voxel sizes, therefore reslicing is necessary.

affine = img.affine

Read the voxel size from the image header.

voxel_size = img.header.get_zooms()[:3]

Instantiate the Model and apply it to the data.

dsmodel = DiffusionSpectrumModel(gtab)

Lets just use one slice only from the data.

dataslice = data[:, :, data.shape[2] // 2]

dsfit = dsmodel.fit(dataslice)

Load an odf reconstruction sphere

sphere = get_sphere('symmetric724')

Calculate the ODFs with this specific sphere

ODF = dsfit.odf(sphere)

print('ODF.shape (%d, %d, %d)' % ODF.shape)

ODF.shape (96, 96, 724)

In a similar fashion it is possible to calculate the PDFs of all voxels in one call with the following way

PDF = dsfit.pdf()

print('PDF.shape (%d, %d, %d, %d, %d)' % PDF.shape)

PDF.shape (96, 96, 17, 17, 17)

We see that even for a single slice this PDF array is close to 345 MBytes so we really have to be careful with memory usage when use this function with a full dataset.

The simple solution is to generate/analyze the ODFs/PDFs by iterating through each voxel and not store them in memory if that is not necessary.

from dipy.core.ndindex import ndindex

for index in ndindex(dataslice.shape[:2]):
    pdf = dsmodel.fit(dataslice[index]).pdf()

If you really want to save the PDFs of a full dataset on the disc we recommend using memory maps (numpy.memmap) but still have in mind that even if you do that for example for a dataset of volume size (96, 96, 60) you will need about 2.5 GBytes which can take less space when reasonable spheres (with < 1000 vertices) are used.

Let’s now calculate a map of Generalized Fractional Anisotropy (GFA) [Tuch04] using the DSI ODFs.

from dipy.reconst.odf import gfa

GFA = gfa(ODF)

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig_hist, ax = plt.subplots(1)
ax.set_axis_off()
plt.imshow(GFA.T)
plt.savefig('dsi_gfa.png', bbox_inches='tight', origin='lower', cmap='gray')

See also Calculate DSI-based scalar maps for calculating different types of DSI maps.