Evren Ozarslan1,2,
Noam Shemesh3, Cheng Guan Koay1, 4, Yoram Cohen3,
Peter Joel Basser1
1STBB / PPITS /
NICHD, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA; 2Center
for Neuroscience & Regenerative Medicine, USUHS, Bethesda, MD, USA; 3School
of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 4Department
of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Previous methods to determine the axon diameter distribution (ADD) from MR data assume a known statistical distribution of compartment sizes. To overcome this limitation, theoretical relationships between the MR signal intensity and the moments of a general distribution of cylindrical compartments are established. A one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillator based reconstruction and estimation (1D-SHORE) framework was used as a numerical tool to estimate these moments. Results on simulated and real MR data obtained from controlled water-filled microcapillaries demonstrate the power of this approach to create contrast based not only on the mean compartment size but also its variance.