Diffusion MRI (dMRI) can provide important information about water exchange between different tissue compartments. In this abstract, we introduce a generalized model to measure the exchange rate using arbitrary gradient sequences. We present a unified theory that incorporates water diffusion and exchange as a stochastic diffusion-exchange process. Our work for the first time allows to compare different diffusion sequences and allows to determine the optimal experimental configurations to measure the exchange rate. In the most common situation with single- or double-diffusion encoding (SDE, DDE) sequences, our theory shows that DDE is more sensitive to water exchange at short time scale. We validate our theory using Monte-Carlo simulations.
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