Ming-Chung Chou1,
Ya-Ling Lin1, Hsiao-Chien Miao1, Hing-Chiu Chang2,
Tsyh-Jyi Hsieh3, Gin-Chung Liu3
1Department
of Medical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, Kaohsiung Medical University,
Kaohsiung, Taiwan; 2Graduate Institute of Biomedical Engineering
and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 3Department
of Medical Imaging, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI) is an imaging technique capable of resolving intra-voxel fiber crossings and has been widely utilized to study neuronal fiber tracts in human brain. Since DSI technique requires hundreds of diffusion directions being sampled in Cartesian coordinate of q-space and takes very long acquisition time, echo-planar imaging (EPI) was usually employed to acquire the DSI data due to its high time-efficiency and high signal-to-noise ratio. However, the insufficient bandwidth in the phase-encoding direction caused strong susceptibility distortions in diffusion-weighted EPI. PROPELLER EPI was demonstrated to have capability of reducing susceptibility distortions and has been utilized to acquire DTI data [2]. Also, by using the keyhole reconstruction, the PROPELLER EPI can be further harnessed to reduce susceptibility distortions in QBI without lengthening acquisition time. Hence, this study employed PROPELLER acquisition to acquire DSI data and compare the fiber tracts with those of conventional DSI, and results showed that the tracts were in better agreement with anatomical locations in TSE T2WI.
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