DT-MRI Streamsurfaces Revisited

DT-MRI streamsurfaces, defined as surfaces that are everywhere tangential to the major and medium eigenvector fields, have been proposed as a tool for visualizing regions of predominantly planar behavior in diffusion tensor MRI. Even though it has long been known that their construction assumes that the involved eigenvector fields satisfy an integrability condition, it has never been tested systematically whether this condition is met in real-world data. We introduce a suitable and efficiently computable test to the visualization literature, demonstrate that it can be used to distinguish integrable from nonintegrable configurations in simulations, and apply it to whole-brain datasets of 15 healthy subjects. We conclude that streamsurface integrability is approximately satisfied in a substantial part of the brain, but not everywhere, including some regions of planarity. As a consequence, algorithms for streamsurface extraction should explicitly test local integrability. Finally, we propose a novel patch-based approach to streamsurface visualization that reduces visual artifacts, and is shown to more fully sample the extent of streamsurfaces.