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.