Anisotropic diffusion phantoms based on microcapillaries

作者：Vellmer Sebastian; Edelhoff Daniel; Suter Dieter; Maximov Ivan I^*

来源：Journal of Magnetic Resonance, 2017, 279: 1-10.

DOI：10.1016/j.jmr.2017.04.002

• Diffusion MRI
• Diffusion kurtosis imaging
• Microcapillary
• Diffusion phantom
• Microimaging
• Time-dependent diffusion
• Axonal models

Diffusion MRI is an efficient and widely used technique for the investigation of tissue structure and organisation in vivo. Multiple phenomenological and biophysical diffusion models are intensively exploited for the analysis of the diffusion experiments. However, the verification of the applied diffusion models remains challenging. In order to provide a "gold standard" and to assess the accuracy of the derived parameters and the limitations of the diffusion models, anisotropic diffusion phantoms with well known architecture are demanded. In the present work we built four anisotropic diffusion phantoms consisting of hollow microcapillaries with very small inner diameters of 5, 10 and 20 mu m and outer diameters of 90 and 150 mu m. For testing the suitability of these phantoms, we performed diffusion measurements on all of them and evaluated the resulting data with a set of popular diffusion models, such as diffusion tensor and diffusion kurtosis imaging, a two compartment model with intra- and extra-capillary water spaces using bi-exponential fitting, and time-dependent diffusion coefficients in Mitra's limit. The perspectives and limitations of these diffusion phantoms are presented and discussed.

• 出版日期2017-6