Carson Ingo1,
Richard L. Magin1, Luis Colon-Perez2, William Triplett3,
Thomas H. Mareci3
1Department
of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, United
States; 2Department of Physics, University of Florida,
Gainesville, FL, United States; 3Department of Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States
We modeled diffusion in neural tissue from the perspective of the continuous time random walk. The characteristic diffusion decay is represented by the Mittag-Leffler function, which does not make a priori assumptions about the governing statistics. We then used entropy as a measure of the anomalous features for the characteristic function. DWI experiments were performed on fixed rat brains using a spectrometer at 17.6 Tesla at b-values arrayed up to 25,000 s/mm^2. In white and gray matter regions, the Mittag-Leffler and entropy parameters demonstrated new information regarding sub-diffusion and produced different image contrast from that of the classical diffusion coefficient.