arXiv:2511.14807eess.IVcs.AI2025-11中稿 · SPIE Medical Imagi…

提出可全程反向传播的脑白质纤维追踪方法,让深度学习更精准分析大脑连接结构。

Fully Differentiable dMRI Streamline Propagation in PyTorch

  • 用PyTorch实现全程可微分的纤维追踪算法,梯度可穿透每一步计算。
  • 性能媲美主流追踪方法,在保持精度的同时实现端到端学习兼容。
  • 适合做脑连接建模、神经影像深度学习等需要可微分结构的科研场景。

扩散MRI(dMRI)为活体组织微结构提供独特探查手段,广泛应用于脑连接分析、多条件建模及宏观结构特征估计。纤维追踪作为20世纪末兴起、21世纪初快速发展的技术,用于可视化大脑白质通路。现有追踪方法多依赖非可微的逐段传播或全局能量优化,虽深度学习进展显著,但传统方法难以融入端到端学习框架。尽管已有研究尝试在可微框架中表示纤维轨迹,但尚无方法实现全程可微传播。本文提出一种基于PyTorch的全可微纤维追踪方案,其核心在于无任何组件阻断梯度流,从而保证全程可微。实验表明,该方法在数值精度上匹配主流算法,同时具备可微特性。通过将纤维追踪嵌入可微分的PyTorch框架,实现了追踪与深度学习流程的深度融合,为构建兼具计算鲁棒性与科学严谨性的宏观结构推理新范式奠定基础。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) provides a distinctive means to probe the microstructural architecture of living tissue, facilitating applications such as brain connectivity analysis, modeling across multiple conditions, and the estimation of macrostructural features. Tractography, which emerged in the final years of the 20th century and accelerated in the early 21st century, is a technique for visualizing white matter pathways in the brain using dMRI. Most diffusion tractography methods rely on procedural streamline propagators or global energy minimization methods. Although recent advancements in deep learning have enabled tasks that were previously challenging, existing tractography approaches are often non-differentiable, limiting their integration in end-to-end learning frameworks. While progress has been made in representing streamlines in differentiable frameworks, no existing method offers fully differentiable propagation. In this work, we propose a fully differentiable solution that retains numerical fidelity with a leading streamline algorithm. The key is that our PyTorch-engineered streamline propagator has no components that block gradient flow, making it fully differentiable. We show that our method matches standard propagators while remaining differentiable. By translating streamline propagation into a differentiable PyTorch framework, we enable deeper integration of tractography into deep learning workflows, laying the foundation for a new category of macrostructural reasoning that is not only computationally robust but also scientifically rigorous.

脑连接分析可微分追踪PyTorchdMRI

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。