Abstract #0852

Han E, Xu D, Vigneron D, Hess C, Mukherjee P

Whole-brain 3T HARDI with 55 diffusion-encoding directions and b=3000 s/mm-sq was performed at 2.2 mm isotropic voxel resolution within a 15 minute acquisition time on five adult normal volunteers, two traumatic brain injury patients, and two patients with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Multimodal intravoxel fiber orientations were derived from the HARDI data using three different techniques: spherical harmonic q-ball, spherical deconvolution, and the diffusion orientation transform. All 3 methods provided effective visualization of normal complex white matter architecture in the volunteers and aberrant or injured white matter in the patients. Whole-brain HARDI is feasible for routine clinical application.