Lauriane Jug1, Simon Auguste Lambert2, Simon Chatelin2, Leon ter BEEK3, Valrie Vilgrain1, Bernard E. Van BEERS1, Lynne E. Bilston4, Bojan Guzina5, Sverre Holm6
1U773-CRB3, INSERM, Paris, France; 2U773-CRB3, INSERM, Paris, France; 3Philips Medical Systems, Best, Netherlands; 4University of New South Wales, Neuroscience Research Australia, New South Wales, Australia; 5Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States; 6Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
In diffusion-weighted imaging, micro-structural information is lost due to the massive averaging that occurs within the imaging voxel and can only be revealed when exploring the tissue using different b-values. Similarly, for the first time we demonstrated using magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) that the frequency-dependence of mechanical shear wave diffusion can allow probing sub-voxel distributions of scattering structures and as a consequence overcome the spatial resolution limitation relying intrinsically on the MR imaging sensitivity. This technique opens perspective of detecting small metastases or neo-vascularisation which could really justify the use of MRE as a powerful clinical diagnosis tool.