Chiara Giraudo1, Stano Motyka1, Siegfried Trattnig1, and Wolfgang Bogner1
STEAM-DTI sequence recently provided excellent results for
DTI analysis of muscle fibers (e.g., high signal-to-noise ratio, low apparent
diffusion coefficient, high fractional anisotropy values) but demonstrated also
to be affected by strong artifacts, which can be assumed to be due to involuntary
muscle contractions. The hereby proposed automatic post-processing method,
based on weighted mean of the averages for each DTI-direction and b-value,
demonstrated to successfully detect and correct these artifacts, improving
fiber tracking of the calf muscles.
