Dimitrios C. Karampinos1, Christopher P.
Hess1, Konstantinos Arfanakis2, Suchandrima Banerjee3,
Eric T. Han3, Thomas M. Link1, Sharmila Majumdar1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging,
University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; 2Biomedical
Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, United States; 3Applied
Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States
Fiber
direction measurements in skeletal muscle DTI are limited by low precision
because of the low SNR of muscle diffusion-weighted MRI and the low
anisotropy of muscle diffusion tensor. However, in most skeletal muscles,
fibers have a preferential orientation. In the present work, a priori
assumptions about the dominant fiber orientation are used to derive
non-uniform diffusion encoding schemes that minimize the elliptical cone of
uncertainty. Simulations show that optimized schemes can decrease the fiber
direction uncertainty up to 37% relative to uniform schemes. Preliminary in
vivo results in the human tibialis anterior muscle are presented.
Keywords