Rdiger Stirnberg1, Tony Stcker1, N. Jon Shah1,2
1Institute of Neurosciences and Biophysics, Research Centre Juelich, Juelich, Germany; 2Faculty of Medicine, Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen University, JARA, Aachen, Germany
An important issue in Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is the use of a well-chosen gradient encoding scheme. The most established schemes, minimising the orientational dependence of the reliability of DTI, are the Jones schemes. Here, a geometrical, point-symmetric method has been developed and implemented which mimics the Jones schemes successfully for an arbitrary number of directions. Appropriately describing their underlying construction, the resulting schemes are entitled DISCOBALL schemes. Using simulations, previously performed by Skare, Jones and Landmann et al., it is shown that the proposed versatile schemes perform as well as the computationally demanding Jones schemes.