MICCAI workshop on Diffusion Modelling and the Fibre Cup
Cardiff, UK
sep 24th, 2009
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/miccai/dmfc/

Over the last decade interest in diffusion MRI has exploded. The technique provides a unique insight into the microstructure of living tissue and enables in-vivo connectivity mapping of the brain. Microstructural changes are often the earliest signs of disease or tissue regeneration. Tractography and connectivity mapping give fundamental new insights in neuroscience and neuroanatomy. This is a two-part workshop, covering computational advances in Diffusion Imaging and tractography techniques.

Diffusion Modelling
The first part of this workshop builds on the success of last year's Computational Diffusion MRI MICCAI workshop, which focused on advances in the computational techniques that underpin and inform diffusion imaging.

Computational techniques are key to the continued success and development of diffusion MRI and to its widespread transfer into the clinic. This workshop will focus on the challenges at all stages of the diffusion MRI pipeline: acquisition, reconstruction, modelling and model fitting, image processing, fibre tracking, connectivity mapping, visualization, group studies and inference.

The Fibre Cup
The Fibre Cup targets the evaluation of reconstruction models and tractography algorithms in diffusion MRI. The emergence of numerous models and fibre tracking techniques during the last decade raises the urgent need for a comprehensive comparison of available methods on a common ground truth dataset. To this end, we are building a MR phantom containing a plethora of realistic crossing, kissing, splitting and bending fibre configurations to be used as a ground truth dataset for method comparison. A DT-MRI and HARDI datasets will be acquired and published on-line.

Participants to the contest will be asked to run their algorithms on the phantom dataset and return their results along with a 2-page paper summarizing the method. Finally, tractography results will be compared to the exact morphological parameters of the phantom (e.g., fibre bundle length, curvature, or thickness) for quantitative evaluation. Winners of the contest will be announced during the workshop. Data, important dates and contest rules will be made available by the end of June on the DMFC'09 website.

IMPORTANT DATES

Diffusion modelling submissions

26th June
Paper Submission
13th July
Notification of Acceptance
11th August
Camera-Ready Papers
24th September
Workshop
Fibre cup submissions

31st July
Paper Submission
11th August
Notification of Acceptance
18th August
Camera-Ready Papers
24th September
Workshop
TOPICS

The organizers encourage submissions of papers in areas including, but not limited to, the following topics:

Acquisition design
High angular resolution techniques
Biophysical models
The microstructure of diffusion in tissue
Tractography and connectivity mapping
Network analysis
Registration and segmentation
Visualization
Validation
Post-processing
Group studies and statistical analysis
Clinical applications
The organizers also invite you to enter your tractography algorithm in the Fibre Cup (details to follow)

Papers submitted to the main conference or other MICCAI workshops may be double-submitted to DMFC 2009, and we encourage tractography methods entered in in the Fibre Cup to also be entered to the first half of the workshop.