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Abstract #0253

The Dot…wherefore art thou? Search for the isotropic restricted diffusion compartment in the brain with spherical tensor encoding and strong gradients

Chantal M.W. Tax1, Filip Szczepankiewicz 2,3, Markus Nilsson2, and Derek K Jones1

1CUBRIC, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom, 2Clinical sciences, Lund, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 3Random Walk Imaging AB, Lund, Sweden

The accuracy of biophysical models requires that all relevant tissue compartments are modelled. The so-called “dot compartment” is a conjectured compartment that represents small cells with apparent diffusivity approaching zero. We establish an upper limit of the “dot-fraction” across the whole brain in vivo, by using ultra-high gradients and optimized gradient waveforms for spherical tensor encoding. We report a notable signal above the noise floor in the cerebellar gray matter even for an extremely high b-value of 15000 s/mm2. For cerebral tissue, the dot-fraction seems negligible, and we consider how exchange may have affected this result.

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