Adriaan L.
Moerland1, Elizabeth A. Moore2
1Advanced Development,
Diffusion
MRI is increasingly important in clinical radiology, however the technique is
very sensitive to system defects in the gradient chain. A new method has been
developed for easy QA in diffusion MRI. The acquisition is 3 fast DTI scans
on a spherical aqueous phantom, taking less than 3 minutes. Analysis is fully
automated and derives measures of deformation of the circular phantom image
as well as apparent diffusion coefficient ADC and fractional anisotropy FA
values. Two of the deformation measures were found to be highly sensitive to
gradient defects such as eddy current (mis)calibration.