Optimized Diffusion-Weighted LASER Sequence for Single-Shot Measurement of Metabolite Diffusion by the Trace of the Tensor

Charlotte Marchadour¹, ², Vincent Lebon¹, ², Julien Valette¹, ²

One way to characterize intracellular microenvironment regardless of anisotropic organization is the measurement of the trace of the diffusion tensor (Dav) for intracellular metabolites by diffusion-weighted spectroscopy. Here we propose a sequence to measure Dav in a single scan. This sequence consists in two improvements of a previously proposed sequence. First, diffusion gradients are inserted to fill the whole dead time of the sequence. Second, effective gradient amplitude is increased by combining gradients to generate a new set of three orthogonal directions. These two modifications yield a significant 2.75 increase of the b-value while keeping echo time unchanged.