The measurement of intracellular metabolite mobility with diffusion weighted spectroscopy (DWS) provides a cell-specific probe for microstructure. Measurements in animals and humans with conventional one dimensional diffusion encoding and model-guided analysis suggest that the main component of the intracellular space of both neurons and astrocytes comprises mainly anisotropic fibrous geometries. In this study we performed double diffusion encoded spectroscopy (DDES) in the human brain as a direct probe of anisotropic intracellular diffusion. As expected, our results support a main fibrous component but the results also suggest a more complex geometry of astrocytes that could include isotropic compartments.
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