Abstract #3341

Trampel R, Lee R, Jensen J, McGuinness G, Johnson G, Kamenetskiy I

The study of lung structure is of great interest since many pulmonary diseases are associated with abnormalities in the small airways. Conventional diffusion magnetic resonance imaging of hyperpolarized 3He is only capable of monitoring the gas over short time, and hence length, scales because of the short T2* of the gas. Therefore the method is only sensitive to small structures of the lung (e.g. the alveoli) and is relatively insensitive to changes occurring in larger structures such as the bronchioles and bronchi. We present a method using diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI) that is particularly sensitive to diffusion over longer distances.