This work asks a very simple but important question: To what extent can we recover lost SNR by signal averaging in a standard diffusion tensor MRI experiment? Based on the theory that if SNR of a signal is reduced by a factor (1/m), then m2 signal averages will recover that SNR, the diffusion MRI literature often assumes that averaging is the 'magic bullet'. Here, using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that this only true to a certain extent and, despite averaging, low SNR data results in biased DTI estimates.
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