The interest in studying perfusion anisotropy using IVIM imaging is growing. However, due to the small amount of perfusion in some tissues, IVIM imaging is highly sensitive to imperfections in the analysis. In this work, we investigate the impact of improperly modeling diffusion anisotropy on the IVIM effect. Performing numerical simulations of a perfusion-free tissue using different sets of diffusion directions and tissue orientations, we show that fitting anisotropic diffusion to the Kurtosis model creates a direction- and orientation-dependent IVIM effect, which can be minimized by taking the geometric mean of the signals with at least 6 properly chosen directions.
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