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Abstract #3079

Intracellular metabolites exhibit non-Gaussian diffusion in the healthy human brain using magnetic resonance spectroscopy at 7 Tesla

Carson Ingo1, Wyger M. Brink1, Ece Ercan1, Andrew G. Webb1, and Itamar Ronen1

1C.J. Gorter Center for High Field MRI, Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands

Since choline mostly resides in astrocytes, N-acetyl-aspartate mostly presides in axons, and creatine is distributed between both neural cell types, these intracellular metabolites can provide more specific microstructural compartment information compared to water. In this study, we apply diffusion-weighted spectroscopy to analyze axonal and glial structures by identifying non-Gaussian movement of intracellular metabolites in both white and gray matter of the healthy human brain at b-values up to ~17,000 s/mm2. We establish that all measured metabolites exhibited non-Gaussian subdiffusion in both tissue types with the gray matter intracellular space appearing more heterogeneous than white matter, opposite to water diffusion dynamics.

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