Extrapolating fiber crossings from DTI data : can we gain the same 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 acquisitions 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 synthetic phantom validation under different angles of crossing and different SNRs. We corroborate our findings from the phantom study to real human data. We show that with extrapolation of the contextual information the obtained crossings are the same as the ones from the HARDI data, and the robustness to noise is significantly better.