Computer vision encompasses a host of computational techniques to process visual information. Medical imagery is one particular area of application where data comes in various forms: X-rays, ultrasound probes, MRI volumes, EEG recordings, NMR spectroscopy, etc. This dissertation is concerned with techniques for accurate reconstruction of neural pathways from diffusion magnetic resonance imagery (dMRI). This dissertation describes a filtered approach to neural tractography. Existing methods independently estimate the diffusion model at each voxel so there is no running knowledge of confidence in the estimation process. We propose using tractography to drive estimation of the local diffusion model. Toward this end, we formulate fiber tracking as recursive estimation: at each step of tracing the fiber, the current estimate is guided by those previous.

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James Malcolm holds degrees in Computer Science (BS,MS), Mathematics (BS), and Electrical Engineering (MS,PhD). He was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, Psychiatric Neuroimaging Laboratory. He now serves as VP of Engineering at AccelerEyes (Atlanta, GA).