Patent ID: 8849001

Claim:
A voxel-based transformation method for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset, comprising: a) obtaining a subject MRI dataset in a subject space and a dataset of a co-registration template in a template space, the subject MRI dataset being associated with a plurality of subject voxel coordinates, a plurality of subject sampling directions, and a plurality of subject voxel spin amounts, each of which is a function of one of the subject voxel coordinates and one of the subject sampling directions, the dataset of the co-registration template being associated with a plurality of template voxel coordinates, each of the subject voxel coordinates corresponding to one of the template voxel coordinates in the template space according to a mapping function of a co-registration method; b) through an inverse of the mapping function, obtaining one of the subject voxel coordinates of the subject MRI dataset that corresponds to one of the template voxel coordinates of the co-registration template, and obtaining a Jacobian matrix associated with the obtained one of the subject voxel coordinates and the corresponding one of the template voxel coordinates; and c) through a q-space distribution reconstruction (QSDR) function, obtaining a template voxel spin amount which is a function of a template sampling direction and the corresponding one of the template voxel coordinates using the Jacobian matrix and image data at said one of the subject voxel coordinates obtained in step b).