Analytical Fiber ODF Reconstruction in 3D Polarized Light Imaging: Performance Assessment

Three dimensional Polarized Light Imaging (3D-PLI) allows to map the spatial fiber structure of postmortem tissue at a sub-millimeter resolution, thanks to its birefringence property. Different methods have been recently proposed to reconstruct the fiber orientation distribution function (fODF) from high-resolution vector data provided by 3D-PLI. Here, we focus on the analytical fODF computation approach, which uses the spherical harmonics to represent the fODF and analytically computes the spherical harmonics coefficients via the spherical Fourier transform. This work deals with the assessment of the performance of this approach on rich synthetic data which simulates the geometry of the neuronal fibers and on human brain dataset. A computational complexity and robustness to noise analysis demonstrate the interest and great potential of the approach.