Diffusion-tensor data from medical MR imaging consists of a 3 × 3 symmetric positive semi-definite matrix at each voxel. The issue of how to understand, and how to meaningfully display this type of data has been gaining interest since its development as a noninvasive investigative tool [1]. Several schemes have been developed, usually aimed at the display of the spatial geometric structure of each voxel characterized by its eigenvectors. However these efforts have used colour merely as a visualization device, without regard to an underlying metric structure between voxels. At the same time, some work has been developed on analyzing whole-brain structure using independent component analysis, making use of similarity between tensors to identify separated overall structures, e.g. for de-noising of spatial features. In this paper we consider using colour to understand these separated structures, mapping a true metric giving a similarity measure between tensors into a perceptually uniform colour space, so that colour difference corresponds to true difference. We show that such a colour map can better discriminate regions of distinct diffusion properties in the brain than previous methods.
Mark S. Drew, Ghassan Hamarneh, "Visualizing Diffusion Tensor Dissimilarity using an ICA Based Perceptual Colour Metric" in Proc. IS&T 15th Color and Imaging Conf., 2007, pp 42 - 47, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.2007.15.1.art00009