Diffusion MRI scans sensitive to intra-voxel incoherent motion (IVIM) are increasingly being applied to derive properties of capillary blood pseudo-diffusion in-vivo. A robust quantification of pseudo-diffusion measures requires the acquisition of diffusion MRI with multiple weightings and directions, which is time-consuming. Here, we investigate whether the isotropic averaging of spherical tensor diffusion encoding (STE) can improve IVIM estimates and shorten the acquisition time. Our simulations and in-vivo data show that STE can substantially shorten the acquisition time required to robustly quantify pseudo-diffusion while also removing a previously unreported bias in voxels containing complex white matter fiber configurations.
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