Abstract #1323

Habib D, Grebenkov D, Guillot G, Matre X, De Rochefort L, Durand E

The 3D architecture of the pulmonary acinus is a dichotomic branching structure. This could play a role in the non-Gaussian behavior of the signal attenuation as a function of gradient intensity, for measurements of 3He diffusion in human lungs, previously attributed to anisotropic diffusion. A 3D phantom (channels of 3 mm size, total size 28 mm) with a branching structure topologically equivalent to that of the acinus was built, in which diffusion-weighted measurements were performed and compared to different models and to numerical simulations. The numerical approach was in better agreement with the experiments than the existing models.