Carole Frindel1, Stanislas Rapacchi1, Marc Robini1, Han Wen2, Magalie Viallon3, Laurent Fanton4, Pierre Croisille5
1Creatis-LRMN, Universit Lyon 1, INSA Lyon, Lyon, France; 2National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA; 3Hopital Cantonal Universitaire de Genve, Genve, Switzerland; 4Institut de Mdecine Lgale, Universit Lyon 1, Lyon, France; 5Hopital Cardiologique et Pneumologique L. Pradel, Lyon, France
Diffusion weighted imaging in the heart is greatly affected by contractile motion and remains challenging to date. Accurate diffusion measurements require high diffusion encoding gradients and longer echo time that decrease signal strength and thus reduce significantly image quality. This results in diffusion weighted (DW) images corrupted by high level noise, which propagates to parameters computed from the diffusion tensor (e.g. fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity). To overcome this drawback, we propose to perform edge-preserving regularization on the DW images.