AUTHOR=Dessain Quentin , Fuchs Clément , Macq Benoît , Rensonnet Gaëtan TITLE=Fast multi-compartment Microstructure Fingerprinting in brain white matter JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience VOLUME=18 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2024.1400499 DOI=10.3389/fnins.2024.1400499 ISSN=1662-453X ABSTRACT=

We proposed two deep neural network based methods to accelerate the estimation of microstructural features of crossing fascicles in the white matter. Both methods focus on the acceleration of a multi-dictionary matching problem, which is at the heart of Microstructure Fingerprinting, an extension of Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting to diffusion MRI. The first acceleration method uses efficient sparse optimization and a dedicated feed-forward neural network to circumvent the inherent combinatorial complexity of the fingerprinting estimation. The second acceleration method relies on a feed-forward neural network that uses a spherical harmonics representation of the DW-MRI signal as input. The first method exhibits a high interpretability while the second method achieves a greater speedup factor. The accuracy of the results and the speedup factors of several orders of magnitude obtained on in vivo brain data suggest the potential of our methods for a fast quantitative estimation of microstructural features in complex white matter configurations.