Accelerated Mouse Spinal Cord Diffusion Measurements with SNR-Enhancing Joint Reconstruction

Justin P. Haldar¹, Joong H. Kim², Sheng-Kwei Song², Zhi-Pei Liang¹

Diffusion imaging experiments have previously been demonstrated to accurately quantify spinal cord white matter injury and disease in various rodent models. One limitation of these experiments is that substantial signal averaging has been necessary to achieve sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Averaging necessitates long imaging experiments, which can be stressful for imaging subjects and limits throughput. In this work, we demonstrate that an appropriate statistical denoising strategy can be used in place of averaging, leading to experiments that are 4 times faster but are still capable of quantifying spinal cord disease and injury in mouse models of multiple sclerosis and trauma.