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Optimizing the use of diffusion tensor imaging for clinical tractography of the anterior cruciate ligament in the knee
Allen A Champagne1,2, Don Brien2, Andrew McGuire3, Paul Fenton4, Yousef A Marwan5, Paul A Martineau5, and Davide D Bardana3
1School of Medicine, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 2Center for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 3Orthopedic Surgery, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 4Diagnostic Radiology, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 5Orthopedic Surgery, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Diffusion tensor imaging of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) should favor multiband acquisitions, as they provide higher spatial resolution, lower echo time, shorter scan time and improved ACL tractography, compared to traditional methods.

Figure 5. Results from the fiber-based probabilistic tractography and Dice Coefficient analysis

Sagittal slices of the diffusion weighted images (grayscale) are displayed and overlaid with the resampled regions of interest (green, see Figure 2), as well as the reconstructed anterior cruciate ligament (cyan blue), estimated based on fiber-based probabilistic tractography. Both segmentation reconstructions are shown including voxels traversed by the two (left), or either (right), tractograms.

Figure 3. Three-dimensional high resolution structural imaging of the left knee

Three views (sagittal, coronal and axial) of the Double Echo Steady State (DESS) scan are shown highlighting the healthy anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) for this patient (top). The middle and bottom views show the placement of the region of interest seeds within the tibia and femur insertions of the ACL (green), as well as the manual segmentation of the ligament (blue) used for assessment of the tractography outputs.