Chia-Wen Chiang1,
Yong Wang2, Anne H. Cross3, 4, Sheng-Kwei
Song2, 4
1Chemistry,
Washington University in Saint Louis, Saint Louis, MO, United States; 2Radiology,
Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO, United States; 3Neurology,
Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis, MO, United States; 4The
Hope Center for Neurological Disorders, Washington University School of
Medicine, Saint Louis , MO, United States
Diffusion basis spectrum imaging (DBSI) has been demonstrated to accurately detect and quantify multiple diffusion components resulting from crossing fibers, axonal injury, demyelination, and increased cellularity and water content associated with inflammation in both ex vivo phantom and in vivo animal studies. However, the employed 99-direction diffusion-encoding scheme requires a relatively long scanning time significantly hampering the application to examine living mouse optic nerves or spinal cord white matter tracts. In this study, we proposed a simplified 29-direction diffusion encoding-scheme to greatly reduce the scanning time for in vivo spinal cord and optic nerve studies while preserving the accuracy of DBSI computation. Successful validation of 29-direction scheme will facilitate the potential applications both in clinic and animal study using DBSI.