Transferring principles of solid-state and Laplace NMR to the field of in vivo brain MRI

• DOI: 10.5194/mr-1-27-2020
• Publication Date: 2020-02-28T10:41:02Z
• Authors: João P. de Almeid...; Chantal M. W. Tax; Filip Szczepankie...; Derek K. Jones; Carl-Fredrik Westin; Daniel Topgaard
• Keywords: Electricity and magnetism; QC501-766; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; 541; Research Article

Abstract. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the primary method for noninvasive investigations of human brain in health, disease, and development but yields data that are difficult to interpret whenever millimeter-scale voxels contain multiple microscopic tissue environments with different chemical structural properties. We propose a novel MRI framework quantify heterogeneity living as spatially resolved five-dimensional relaxation–diffusion distributions by augmenting conventional diffusion-weighted sequence signal encoding principles from multidimensional solid-state nuclear magnetic (NMR) spectroscopy, correlation methods Laplace NMR porous media, Monte Carlo inversion. The high dimensionality distribution space allows resolution within each heterogeneous voxel well their individual characterization statistical measures combine sensitivity relaxation rates link between microstructure anisotropic diffusivity water. proposed demonstrated on healthy volunteer using both exhaustive clinically viable acquisition protocols.