Julien Cohen-Adad1,2, Jennifer A. McNab1,2,
Thomas Benner1,2, Maxime Descoteaux3, Azma Mareyam1,
Van J. Wedeen1,2, Lawrence L. Wald1,2
1A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical
Imaging, Dept. of Radiology, MGH, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Harvard
Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 3MOIVRE Centre,
Department of Computer Science, Universit de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC,
Canada
Head-insert
gradients are particularly suitable for diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging due
to a higher maximum strength, higher switching rate and higher duty cycle. In
this paper we evaluate the performance of a head-insert combined with 32ch
coil at 3T compared to conventional body gradients, for high spatial and
angular resolution diffusion-weighted imaging. Bootstrap-based metrics
demonstrate higher reproducibility of the Q-Ball estimate and lower
uncertainty on the extracted maxima of the diffusion orientation distribution
function.