Abstract #3772

In Vivo Cardiac NMR Diffusion Weighted Imaging(DWI) for the Human Heart: Improved Quantification of FA and MD by Edge-Preserving Regularization

Carole Frindel¹, Stanislas Rapacchi¹, Marc Robini¹, Han Wen², Magalie Viallon³, Laurent Fanton⁴, Pierre Croisille⁵

¹Creatis-LRMN, Universit Lyon 1, INSA Lyon, Lyon, France; ²National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA; ³Hopital Cantonal Universitaire de Genve, Genve, Switzerland; ⁴Institut de Mdecine Lgale, Universit Lyon 1, Lyon, France; ⁵Hopital Cardiologique et Pneumologique L. Pradel, Lyon, France

Diffusion weighted imaging in the heart is greatly affected by contractile motion and remains challenging to date. Accurate diffusion measurements require high diffusion encoding gradients and longer echo time that decrease signal strength and thus reduce significantly image quality. This results in diffusion weighted (DW) images corrupted by high level noise, which propagates to parameters computed from the diffusion tensor (e.g. fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity). To overcome this drawback, we propose to perform edge-preserving regularization on the DW images.