How Well Can Magnetic Susceptibility Anisotropy Be Estimated? an Error Analysis of Cylindrically Symmetric Susceptibility Tensor Reconstructions from Few Orientations

Cynthia Wisnieff¹, Pascal Spincemaille², Tian Liu³, Yi Wang¹

Susceptibility tensor imaging, STI, has shown evidence of being intrinsically linked to the organization and composition of the myelin sheath of white matter. However, estimating the magnetic susceptibility anisotropy within human subjects is limited by both the acquisition time necessary and the difficulty in reorienting the subject in the scanner. In this work we present an error analysis of constrained system used for cylindrically symmetric susceptibility tensor imaging reconstructions and examine the feasibility of estimating the anisotropy with these constrained reconstructions with few subject orientations in simulations and in vivo.