Characterization of Multicompartmental Renal Diffusion Using a Stretched Exponential Model

Claudia Lenz¹, Gregor Sommer², Klaus Scheffler¹, Leopold Winter², Markus Klarhfer¹

In biologic tissues, microscopic motion of water not only includes molecular diffusion, but also microcirculation of blood in the capillary network. The intraxovel incoherent motion model has been introduced to describe these combined diffusion and microcirculation effects in diffusion weighted imaging. Analysis of the multicompartmental water diffusion is mostly performed by applying a biexponential fit function to the diffusion curve and evaluating the diffusion and perfusion components separately. However, this technique often suffers from high standard fit errors, especially for the perfusion fraction f. In 2003, Bennett et al. proposed a stretched exponential model to account for the multiexponential behavior of diffusion curves in the brain. In this work, we extended the stretched exponential model to the abdomen and present fit results from the kidneys of healthy subjects.