Improved diffusion tractography at the cortical boundary using HARDI acquisitions with high- b /low-k in white matter and low- b /high-k within and near the cortex

Mapping the cortico-cortical brain connections relies on the accurate characterization of the axonal structures in both deep white matter and cortical white/gray boundary regions where fibers can sharply curve from the white matter fascicles into the cortical ribbon. Thus, in the region near the cortex, we ideally want a lower b value but high spatial resolution (high-k). In contrast, structures in deep white matter need high b-values to resolve multiple fiber crossings and therefore need to give up some spatial resolution to preserve sensitivity. Thus, deep white matter voxels call for high-b/low-k acquisition. In this work, we acquired b=8000s/mm2 1.9mm isotropic resolution and b=1500s/mm2 1.0mm isotropic resolution diffusion data on the MGH-USC Connectom scanner. We demonstrated that different brain structures require different imaging parameters to be resolved, and diffusion tractography can be improved by fusing the two datasets.

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