The quantification of transport processes of different substances in the brain's parenchyma is important in the context of understanding brain functioning. Most of the currently used methods for assessment of the effective diffusion coefficient rely on the point-source paradigm. We propose a method for the quantitative characterization of the diffusion process in the brain's parenchyma using a set of images recorded in the experiment during the spreading of a fluorescent dye. Our method exploits the frame-wise comparison of experimental data with a set of images that would be observed for an ideal diffusion process within the same topology. We obtain this reference set of images using blurring the image with an appropriate kernel function, and the degree of such blurring correlates with the spreading process of a dye. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method using (i) the simulated surrogate data, (ii) the set of experimentally recorded fluorescent images of the isolated event of blood-brain barrier (BBB) opening, and (iii) the images of massive multi-source spreading of fluorescent dye.

中文翻译：

---

通过图像处理进行扩散评估：超越点源范式

在了解脑功能的背景下，量化大脑实质中不同物质的运输过程非常重要。当前评估有效扩散系数的大多数方法都依赖于点源范式。我们提出了一种使用一组在荧光染料扩散过程中在实验中记录的图像来定量表征脑实质中扩散过程的方法。我们的方法利用实验数据与一组图像的逐帧比较，对于同一拓扑内的理想扩散过程，将观察到这些图像。我们使用适当的核函数对图像进行模糊处理来获得该参考图像集，并且这种模糊的程度与染料的扩散过程相关。