In this work, we assessed the reproducibility of diffusion MRI metrics w.r.t different experimental and acquisition designs within the same scan time limits. The design that employed identical diffusion gradients and b-values for blip-up phase-encoding and blip-down phase-encoding provided significant improvements in terms of data reproducibility compared to the design using a single b=0 blip-down image in terms of distortions. The proposed 4-way encoding scheme not only improved upon this design but also consistently reduced the effects of other imaging artifacts; therefore, is suggested to be the acquisition scheme of choice for dMRI studies where biological differences are subtle.
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