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Abstract #3146

T2-relaxometry for Myelin Water Fraction Estimation using a Mixture of Wald Distributions

Alireza Akhondi-Asl 1,2 , Onur Afacan 1,2 , Robert V. Mulkern 1,2 , and Simon K. Warfield 1,2

1 Boston Childrens Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, 2 Harvard Medical School, MA, United States

We introduce a novel model with small number of parameters to characterize transverse relaxation rate spectrum at each voxel. We use mixture of three Wald distributions with unknown mixture weights, mean and shape parameters to represent the distribution of the relative amount of water in between myelin sheets, tissue water, and cerebrospinal fluid. Wald distribution has a Gaussian-like distribution with positive support and a closed form Laplace transform which are exceptional and distinctive attributes for the representation of transverse relaxation rate distribution. The parameters of the model are estimated using the constrained variable projection method as a substantial number of unknown parameters is linear.

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