Justin P. Haldar1, Qing Gao2, Xiaohong Joe Zhou2,3, Zhi-Pei Liang1
1Beckman Institute, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA; 2Center for MR Research, University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA; 3Radiology, Neurosurgery, and Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
The stretched exponential curve has recently been proposed to model the non-exponential diffusion-induced signal attenuation observed in biological tissues at large b-values. In this work, we propose two techniques to help improve the robustness of the experiment to measure the parameters of this model. First, using the Cramr-Rao bound, we optimize the set of b-values acquired during the experiment. Second, we make use of a regularized joint image reconstruction technique to help mitigate the effects of measurement noise. The combination of these two techniques enables efficient and robust characterization of anomalous diffusion.