Abstract #4427

Accuracy of axon diameter estimation using diffusion MRI in fiber space

Mohammad Ashtarayeh¹, Tobias Streubel^1,2, Francisco Javier Fritz¹, Joao Periquito³, Andreas Pohlmann³, Thoralf Niendorf³, Henriette Rusch⁴, Markus Morawski⁴, Carsten Jäger², Stefan Geyer², Bibek Dhital⁵, Muhamed Barakovic^6,7, Simona Schiavi ⁸, Alessandro Daducci⁸, and Siawoosh Mohammadi^1,2

¹Department of Systems Neurosciences, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany, ²Department of Neurophysics, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, ³Berlin Ultrahigh Field Facility (B.U.F.F.), Max-Delbrueck-Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, Berlin, Germany, ⁴Paul Flechsig Institute of Brain Research, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, ⁵Department of Radiology, University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, ⁶Signal Processing Lab (LTS5), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, ⁷Translational Imaging in Neurology (ThINk) Basel, Department of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, University Hospital Basel and University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland, ⁸Department of computer science, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

We investigated the effect of different diffusion MRI acquisition protocols (incl. varying gradient-strength and signal-to-noise ratio) on the accuracy of axon diameter index (ADI) estimation in fiber space for human specimens. We used the Bland-Altman plot to estimate the error in the MRI-based ADI measurement. We found that gradient strengths above 900mT/m and b-values larger than b=50k s/mm² provided accurate estimation of ADI (error smaller than 0.13 µm). The error for the best protocol was about 0.04 µm, allowing to distinguish white matter tracts with varying effective axon diameters (e.g. corpus callosum, genu, 1.5 µm and posterior body, 1.93 µm).

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