Extrapolating fiber crossings from DTI data: can we gain similar information as HARDI?

High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) has proven to better characterize complex intra-voxel structures compared to its predecessor diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). However, the benefits from the modest acquisition costs and significantly higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of DTI make it more attractive for use in clinical research. In this work we use contextual information derived from DTI data, to obtain similar crossing information as from HARDI data. We conduct a synthetic phantom study under different angles of crossing and different SNRs. We compare the extrapolated crossings from contextual information with HARDI data. We qualitatively corroborate our findings from the phantom study to real human data. We show that with extrapolation of the contextual information, the obtained crossings are similar to the ones from the HARDI data, and the robustness to noise is significantly better.