Joseph A. Helpern1,2, Calvin Lo1, Caixia Hu1, Maria F. Falangola1, Otto Rapalino1, Jens H. Jensen1
1Radiology, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA; 2Medical Physics, The Nathan Kline Institute, Orangeburg, NY, USA
Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging (DKI) is a new technique for quantifying non-Gaussian diffusion yielding conventional diffusion metrics as well as a new metric, the mean kurtosis (MK). In human stroke, the MK identified ischemic brain regions that correlated with DWI and ADC maps, but in several cases MK also identified affected regions adjacent to acute infarct not apparent on other images. Within the region of ischemia MK maps were heterogeneous in appearance, and the temporal behavior of MK was different than DWI or ADC. The fact that MK identifies brain regions affected by ischemia not identified by conventional DWI is encouraging.
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