Feasible 3-Orientation Acquisition for Detecting Susceptibility Anisotropy in the Human Brain Using Prior Structural Information

Cynthia Wisnieff¹, ², Tian Liu¹, ², Pascal Spincemaille², Yi Wang¹, ²

Susceptibility tensor imaging is an ill-posed inverse problem that requires sampling at many impractical orientations. We investigate the ability to detect susceptibility anisotropy in the human brain using structural prior information and reducing the number of orientations to as few as three. The prior information includes 1) the susceptibility tensor shape is cylindrically symmetric (CS); and 2) the susceptibility tensor shares its orthonormal basis with the diffusion tensor. Use of CS was validated in carbon fibers. It is observed here that the susceptibility anisotropy pattern detected in the brain appears to be similar between the 13 and 3 orientation reconstructions.