Abstract #1058
A Novel Method of Partitioning Diffusion Weighting Schemes for Efficient Comparisons of DTI Protocols
Landman B, Farrell J, Mori S, Prince J
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
We present a methodology that enables reuse of diffusion weighted data from a single acquisition in subsets. These results closely approximate those independently achievable with optimized schemes of fewer DWDs. First, we show how to derive optimal subsets from an existing master set of DWDs. Second, we perform de novo joint optimization of both master and subsets of particular sizes simultaneously. Our methodology is applicable to any DTI study which computes diffusion tensors from subsets of available data. We demonstrate an efficient means to assess DTI derived contrasts as a function of diffusion encoding scheme and to augment existing schemes.