Dimitrios C. Karampinos1,2, Kevin F. King3, Danchin Chen1, Bradley P. Sutton2,4, John G. Georgiadis1,2
1Mechanical Science and Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA; 2Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA; 3GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, USA; 4Bioengineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
Although it has been reported that the secondary eigenvalue is consistently different than the tertiary eigenvalue in diffusion tensor imaging of the skeletal muscle, the etiology of the asymmetry of skeletal muscle transverse diffusivity is under debate. In the present work, we apply high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) to study the transverse diffusion asymmetry. A circular spectrum decomposition of the transverse diffusivity is proposed to quantify this asymmetry with HARDI measurements and to test the adequacy of the diffusion tensor model to represent the underlying diffusion process in the range of b-values used in in-vivo muscle DTI experiments.