Tissue Segmentation Using Sparse Non-negative Matrix Factorization of Spherical Mean Diffusion MRI Data

In this paper, we present a method based on sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) for brain tissue segmentation using diffusion MRI (DMRI) data. Unlike existing NMF-based approaches, in our method NMF is applied to the spherical mean data, computed on a per-shell basis, instead of the original diffusion-weighted images. This is motivated by the fact that the spherical mean is independent of the fiber orientation distribution and is only dependent on tissue microstructure. Applying NMF to the spherical mean data will hence allow tissue signal separation based solely on the microstructural properties, unconfounded by factors such as fiber dispersion and crossing. We show results explaining why applying NMF directly on the diffusion-weighted images fails and why our method is able to yield the expected outcome, producing tissue segmentation with greater accuracy.