Jiachen Zhuo1, Jonathan Z. Simon2, Rao P. Gullapalli1
1Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States; 2Electrical & Computer Engineering, Biology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States
Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) has gained much interest lately as a tool that can reveal subtle tissue microstructure changes over and beyond available from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The main challenge for clinical applications of DKI is the long imaging acquisition time due to the increased measurements needed to fit a more complex model (21 model parameters). Here we study the effect of diffusion weightings and diffusion directions in estimated DKI parameters to determine the optimal DKI imaging schemes within a clinically feasible image acquisition time (< 10min), and to understand the estimation variability in using these optimal DKI schemes.