HARDI reconstruction challenge 2013

LTS5, in collaboration with the Section of Biomedical Image Analysis, University of Pennsylvania (USA), and the Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab (SCIL), Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), organizes a contest/workshop on high angular resolution diffusion MRI reconstruction techniques. More details can be found on the hardi.epfl.ch website.

The workshop will be hosted in the workshops and tutorials special session of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2013) conference, which will be held in San Francisco (USA) from 7 to 11 April 2013.

The contest and the workshop are open to everyone, so please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested. Should you have any another question, please do not hesitate to contact us.

If you are interested in participating in the competition and the related workshop, please just express your interest by sending an email to the organizers.

MOTIVATION

Validation is the bottleneck for the diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) community.

In the last few years a multitude of new reconstruction algorithms have been proposed to recover the local intra-voxel fiber structure. Some of them aim at improving the quality of the reconstructions while others focus on reducing the acquisition time. However, when a new algorithm is proposed, the performances are normally assessed with ad-hoc synthetic data and evaluation criteria, and comparing different approaches can be difficult. In a clinical perspective this aspect is crucial, as the availability of a comprehensive comparison of available reconstruction methods, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of each approach, might help clinicians in the choice of the most adequate diffusion MRI technique for a specific clinical application.

The high angular resolution diffusion MRI reconstruction challenge is organized with the aim to provide all researchers in this field with a common framework to assess the performances of their own local reconstruction schemes and fairly compare their results against other approaches under controlled conditions. The main goal of this contest is to investigate not only the local accuracy in the estimation of the intra-voxel fiber configuration of each algorithm, but also the effect of the local reconstruction accuracy on subsequent global connectivity analyses.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

• Alessandro Daducci, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
• Emmanuel Caruyer, Section of Biomedical Image Analysis (SBIA), University of Pennsylvania (USA)
• Maxime Descoteaux, Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab (SCIL), Université de Sherbrooke (Canada)
• Jean-Philippe Thiran, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne & University of Lausanne (Switzerland)

IMPORTANT DATES

• January 31, 2013 - Deadline for teams’ registration
• April 11, 2013 - Workshop at ISBI 2013 in San Francisco, USA