Adaptive enhancement in diffusion MRI through propagator sharpening

In this short note we consider a method of enhancing diffusion MRI data based on analytically deblurring the ensemble average propagator. Because of the Fourier relationship between the normalized signal and the propagator, this technique can be applied in a straightforward manner to a large class of models. In the case of diffusion tensor imaging, a commonly used ‘ad hoc’ min
min
-normalization sharpening method is shown to be closely related to this deblurring approach. The main goal of this manuscript is to give a formal description of the method for (generalized) diffusion tensor imaging and higher order apparent diffusion coefficient-based models. We also show how the method can be made adaptive to the data, and present the effect of our proposed enhancement on scalar maps and tractography output.