Nicolas Pannetier1,
2, Maja Sohlin3, Thomas Christen4, Lothar R.
Schad5, Norbert Schuff1, 2
1Department
of Radiology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA,
United States; 2Centre for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases,
Veteran Affairs Medical Centre, San Francisco, CA, United States; 3MR
centre, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Goteborg, Sweden; 4Department
of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 5Computer
Assisted Clinical Medicine, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Heidelberg,
Germany
MRI is a powerful tool to investigate the microvasculature. Various techniques benefit from the entanglement of the contrasts that arise within a voxel and provide relevant biomarkers. However, the analysis relies on analytical models that present a discrepancy with Monte Carlo simulations. In this work we present a versatile approach directly based on a numerical model. The approach is evaluated on phantom data where vessels are mimicked by polyamide strings. We compared our model with analytical ones and we demonstrated that this approach could provide a mean to estimate the radius of the vessel without the use of contrast agent (CA).