Computed Tomographic (CT) Reconstruction of the Average Propagator from Diffusion Weighted MR Data

Wolfram R. Jarisch¹, Evren zarslan², Peter J. Basser

We propose a new method for computed tomography (CT) reconstruction of the entire 3-D Average Propagator, P(r), from diffusion-weighted (DW) MRI data. It entails recognizing that the central slice theorem relates an oblique planar slice of the DWI data in q-space and the corresponding 2-D marginal distribution (projection) of P(r) in r-space. Economy in the CT reconstruction is achieved by employing High-Efficiency CT (HECT), a new CT reconstruction method based on an approximation to Bayes maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation, along with a priori information, and an optimized experimental design. Our goal is to reconstruct P(r) using approximately 256 DWIs.