Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

dMRI@Olea-Medical

Participants : Aurobrata Ghosh, Théodore Papadopoulo, Rachid Deriche.

The ongoing collaboration with Olea Medical has allowed us to form a crucial link between academic research at Athena and the medical imaging industry, via Olea Medical . Since Auro's recruitment in May and following a planned road-map, we have been developing a generic and templated C++ core library comprised of the expert algorithms researched at Athena in the domain of diffusion MRI. This library and its functionalities are being integrated into Olea Medical 's flagship product Olea Sphere. So far the following non-exhaustive list of estimation modules have been implemented – DTI (least squares (LS), weighted least squares (WLS) & Cholesky, which provides positivity constraint); Generalized DTI using tensors of order 4 (LS, WLS & Ternary Quartics (TQ) which provides positivity constraint) and DKI (LS, WLS, Cholesky + TQ for positivity). Further a number of biomarkers or scalar strains for each of these models have also been implemented, such as FA, MD, VR, RA, MK, etc. The external tools used consist of well known standard libraries and softwares such as C++ STL, LAPACK, NLOpt, CMake, Git, etc. Finally an externally callable C-interface is provided to wrap the core C++ library, which makes it useable from C++ and C programs.

The next milestones on the road-map includes higher order models such as ODFs, FODs, EAPs, etc. This will be followed up by tractography algorithms – both deterministic and probabilistic.