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Abstract #0498

Application of Diffusional Kurtosis to Modeling of the Cerebral Microenvironment

Edward S. Hui1, 2, Ali Tabesh1, 2, Joseph A. Helpern1, 2, Jens H. Jensen1, 2

1Center for Biomedical Imaging, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, United States; 2Dept of Radiology and Radiological Science, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, United States


Diffusion MRI (dMRI) has often been augmented with tissue-specific modeling in order to explicitly relate dMRI data to microstructural properties such as the sizes, orientations, volume fractions, and diffusivities of prescribed cellular compartments. One approach to tissue modeling is to exploit the close link between cytoarhitecture and the non-Gaussanity of water diffusion, which may be obtained with the dMRI technique known as diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI). In this work, we propose a method, cerebral microenvironment modeling, which generalize the white matter model by Fieremans et al so that specific microstructural properties of the entire brain may be obtained with DKI.