The growing importance of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in studying the white matter architecture in normal and pathologic states necessitates the development of tools for comprehensive analysis of diffusion tensor data. Operations such as multivariate statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, interpolation and filtering, must now be performed on tensor data, and must overcome challenges in...

Although many studies are starting to use voxel-based analysis (VBA) methods to compare diffusion tensor images between healthy and diseased subjects, it has been demonstrated that VBA results depend heavily on parameter settings and implementation strategies, such as the applied coregistration technique, smoothing kernel width, statistical analysis, etc. In order to investigate the effect of d...

The intra-voxel incoherent motion (IVIM) model assumes that blood flowing in isotropically distributed capillary segments induces a phase dispersion of the MR signal, which increases the signal attenuation in diffusion-weighted images. However, in most tissue types the capillary network has an anisotropic micro-architecture. In this study, we investigated the possibility to indirectly infer the...

Traumatic injury to spinal cord affects thousands of persons and costs billions of dollars annually in treatment expenses. Although less than a decade ago spinal cord injury was thought of as an untreatable condition, many promising new treatments are now in the experimental stage. Rodent models are essential for validating new therapeutic trials. This paper presents results of in vivo magnetic...

Cerebral edema is the common pathogenic mechanism for cognitive impairment in minimal hepatic encephalopathy. Whether complete reversibility of brain edema, cognitive deficits, and their associated imaging can be achieved after liver transplantation remains an open question. To characterize white matter integrity before and after liver transplantation in patients with minimal hepatic encephalop...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The differentiation between classic and atypical meningiomas may have implications in preoperative planning but may not be possible on the basis of conventional MR imaging. Our hypothesis was that classic and atypical meningiomas have different patterns of intratumoral water diffusion that will allow for differentiation between them. MATERIALS AND METHODS Preoperative d...

We study a class of numerical schemes for nonlinear diffusion filtering that offers insights on the design of novel wavelet shrinkage rules for isotropic and anisotropic image enhancement. These schemes utilise analytical or semi-analytical solutions to dynamical systems that result from space-discrete nonlinear diffusion filtering on minimalistic images with 2×2 pixels. We call them locally an...

Quantitative diffusion imaging is a powerful technique for the characterization of complex tissue microarchitecture. However, long acquisition times and limited signal-to-noise ratio represent significant hurdles for many in vivo applications. This article presents a new approach to reduce noise while largely maintaining resolution in diffusion weighted images, using a statistical reconstructio...

PURPOSE To present a novel technique for high-resolution stimulated echo diffusion tensor imaging with self-navigated interleaved spirals readout trajectories that can inherently and dynamically correct for image artifacts due to spatial and temporal variations in the static magnetic field (B0) resulting from eddy currents, tissue susceptibilities, subject/physiological motion, and hardware ins...

OBJECTIVE We wanted to evaluate the effect of the number of diffusion-sensitizing gradient directions on the image quality for evaluating myocardial anisotropy and fiber tracking by using in vitro diffusion tensor MR imaging (DT-MRI). MATERIALS AND METHODS The DT-MR images, using a SENSE-based echoplanar imaging technique, were acquired from ten excised porcine hearts by using a 3T MR scanner...