Optimal Design of Multiple Q-shells experiments for Diffusion MRI

Recent advances in diffusion MRI make use of the diffusion signal sampled on the whole Q-space, rather than on a single sphere. While much effort has been done to design uniform sampling schemes for single shell experiment, it is yet not clear how to build a strategy to sample the diffusion signal in the whole Fourier domain. In this article, we propose a method to generate acquisition schemes for multiple Qshells experiment in diffusion MRI. The acquisition protocols we design are incremental, which means they remain approximately optimal when truncated before the acquisition is complete. Our method is fast, incremental, and we can generate diffusion gradients schemes for any number of acquisitions, any number of shells, and any number of points per shell. The samples arranged on different shells do not share the same directions. The method is tested for Spherical Polar Fourier reconstruction of the diffusion signal, and based on Monte-Carlo simulations, several preferred acquisition parameters are identified.