Siamak Pourabdollah-Nejad1,2, David Hearshen3, Quan Jiang1,4, Douglas Noll2, Panayiotis Mitsias1, Brian Silver1, Michael Chopp1
1Department of Neurology, Henry Ford
Hospital, Detroit, MI, USA; 2Department of Biomedical Engineering,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; 3Department of
Radiology, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, USA; 4Department of
Physics, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA
We demonstrate the application of a novel anisotropy map for monitoring white matter recovery in stroke patients. The new map termed Standard Deviation (SD) map is based on calculating the standard deviation of diffusion using diffusion q-ball MRI. SD map for a stroke patient has been created and validated using the q-ball orientation distribution function map. The results show that this map is able to identify white matter reorganization in recovering brain regions predominated with crossing fibers. This makes this map more reliable than the standard Fractional Anisotropy map for identifying these brain regions.