Abstract #3623

Local Variations of Magnetic Susceptibility Affect the Contrast of Kurtosis Maps: Validation in Phantom at 9.4T and in Human Brain at 3T.

Marco Palombo¹,², Silvia Gentili¹, Silvia De Santis,¹³, Marco Bozzali⁴, Silvia Capuani¹,²

¹ Sapienza University of Rome, Physics Department, Rome, Italy; ²CNR-IPCF UOS Roma, "Sapienza" University of Rome, Rome, Italy; ³CUBRIC, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom; ⁴ISC - CNR Rome, Neuroimaging Laboratory Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy

The goal of this work was to investigate the influence of magnetic susceptibility (Δχ) variations (quantified by the T2* parameter) on non-Gaussian water diffusion, evaluated by means of Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging method. To make our investigation more significant, the dependence of kurtosis indices were studied in both controlled phantom (characterized by pore size from 4 to 10 μm and Δχ≈10^-6 in SI) and human brain.Experimental results reported here show that Δχ variations are correlated with the amount of deviation from Gaussian behavior observed in diffusive decay of water in both controlled phantoms and human brains using Kurtosis approach.