Abstract #2295

The Hematocrit Dependence of Blood T2 Relaxometry Parameters in the Weak Field Approximation

Avery JL Berman^1,2, Jonathan R Polimeni^1,3, and G Bruce Pike^2,4

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Department of Biomedical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, ³Division of Health Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, ⁴Department of Radiology and Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

The weak field approximation (WFA) is a theory that relates T₂ relaxation from tissue to the underlying tissue properties and is commonly applied to the analysis of relaxation from red blood cells (RBCs) in blood. This study examines the hematocrit-dependence of the different parameters of the WFA using simulated populations of RBCs and published experimental relaxometry results from two studies. Both the simulations and the experimental results show an unexpected result that the characteristic perturber size estimate is not constant with hematocrit but is negatively correlated with it. This has important implications for the implementation and interpretation of the WFA theory on blood relaxometry data.

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