John C. Gore1
1Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States
Conventional MRI measures the average macroscopic properties of tissue water hydrogen nuclei from small, spatially-resolved voxels and is not well suited to provide specific information about tissue molecular composition. However, a variety of approaches have been developed that allow information to be obtained about the heterogeneity of tissue properties from within voxels, along with information on their micro-anatomy on scales much below voxel dimensions, permitting the derivation of parameters that can be used for quantitative tissue characterization. These methods have found applications in several tissues including nerve, tumor, muscle and bone.