Abstract #0840

Tractography from Regularized High Resolution Rs-EPI Diffusion Weighted Imaging

Gernot Reishofer¹, Christian Langkammer², David Porter³, Karl Koschutnig⁴, Margit Jehna¹, Robert Merwa⁵, Franz Ebner¹

¹Radiology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria; ²Neurology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria; ³MR R&D, Siemens AG, Healthcare Sector, Erlangen, Germany; ⁴Institute of Psychology, Universtiy of Graz, Graz, Austria; ⁵Medical Engineering, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Linz, Austria

Readout-segmented echo planar imaging (RS-EPI) with 2D navigator-based reacquisition is a new promising technique that enables the sampling of high resolution DWI with reduced susceptibility artifacts. Giving the fact that long scan times are required for high SNR due to the measurement of two or more averages, we set out to regularize the diffusion tensor from RS-EPI DWI based on one measurement. The proposed total variation based regularization algorithm is user independent since the regularization parameter is evaluated automatically and accounts for spatial varying SNR. Tractography from regularized data show a significant improvement compared to unregularized data.