Julien Sngas1, Thomas G. Perkins2, 3, Jochen Keupp1, Christian Stehning1, Gwenael Herigault4, Mariah Smith-Miloff3, Shahid M. Hussain3
1Philips Research Laboratories, Hamburg, Germany; 2Philips Healthcare, Cleveland, OH, United States; 3University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, United States; 4Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherlands
Careful choice of the b-values for in vivo measurements of ADC with IVIM is required to obtain non-biased ADC values with maximal precision for a given acquisition time. The proposed Monte Carlo methodology allows targeting the b-values to the organ-specific perfusion regime. Our results showed that b-value sampling schemes designed to minimize noise propagation can significantly outperform common sampling schemes such as regular distributions of b-values: In the presented study, a 77% increase in ADC SNR was observed just by modifying two b-values from the original diffusion protocol, confirming the prediction of the Monte Carlo simulations.
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