Rapid Diffusion Spectrum Imaging with Partial Q-Space Encoding

Anh Tu Van¹, Rafael O'Halloran¹, Samantha Holdsworth¹, Roland Bammer¹

Despite its much richer information regarding the microstructure of neuronal architectures than other imaging techniques, such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI), applications of diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) in in vivo studies are limited due to its long total acquisition time. The current study proposes to significantly speed up DSI by using partially encoding in q-space, similar to partial Fourier encoding in traditional k-space domain. Both phantom and in vivo experiments are done to show the performance of the proposed method. For the experiments presented, the achieved acquisition speed-up was 44.4%.