Marco Palombo1,2, Clémence Ligneul1,2, Chloé Najac1,2, Juliette Le Douce1,2, Julien Flament1,2, Carole Escartin1,2, Philippe Hantraye1,2, Emmanuel Brouillet1,2, Gilles Bonvento1,2, and Julien Valette1,2
We
introduce a novel paradigm for non-invasive brain microstructure
quantification, where original diffusion modeling is merged with cutting-edge
diffusion-weighted spectroscopy (DW-MRS) experiments to capture features of
cellular morphology that have remained largely ignored by DW-MRI. A compact
description of long-range cellular morphology is used to randomly generate
large collections of synthetic cells where particles diffusion is
simulated. After investigating model robustness, we apply it on metabolite ADC
measured in vivo in the monkey brain up to td=2
seconds. The new paradigm introduced here opens new possibilities to
non-invasively extract quantitative information about cell size, complexity and
heterogeneity in the brain.
