Noam Shemesh1, Evren zarslan2,
Peter J. Basser2, Yoram Cohen1
1School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv
University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 2Section on Tissue Biophysics and Biomimetics,
NICHD, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States
Although
single-pulsed-field-gradient (s-PFG) methodologies such as DTI and the
q-space approach are widely used to probe tissue microstructures, they suffer
from inherent limitations, especially when specimens are characterized by
randomly oriented compartments or size distributions. The double-PFG (d-PFG)
is emerging as a new probe for novel microstructural information that cannot
be achieved by other means. Here we demonstrate that d-PFG can be used to
extract accurate compartment dimensions at low q-values both in phantoms and
in biological cells which are randomly oriented, and in optic and sciatic
nerves. The d-PFG may become an important MRI method in the CNS.