The dependence of the diffusion tensor on frequency is of great interest in studies of tissue microstructure because it reveals restrictions to the Brownian motion of water molecules caused by cell membranes. Oscillating gradient spin‐echo (OGSE) sequences can sample this dependence with gradient shapes for which the power spectrum of the zeroth moment is focused at a target frequency. In order to maintain the total spectral power (ie the b‐value), oscillating gradient amplitudes must grow with the frequency squared. For this reason, OGSE applications on clinical MRI scanners are limited to low frequencies, for which it is difficult to obtain a narrow frequency bandwidth of the gradient moment in a useful echo time. In particular, the commonly used pair of single‐period trapezoidal‐cosine pulses separated by a half‐period produces significant side lobes away from the target frequency. To mitigate this effect, improved OGSE waveforms are proposed, which reduce the gap between the two gradient pulses to the minimum duration required for the refocusing RF pulse. Additionally, a slight deviation from the periodicity of the waveforms is proposed in order to permit using the maximum slew rate of the gradient system for all lobes of trapezoidal waveforms while maintaining advantageous spectral properties, which is not the case for the currently used OGSE sequences. Numerical calculations validate these changes, showing that both modifications significantly narrow the gradient moment power spectrum and increase the contribution of its main lobe to the b‐value, thus improving the specificity of the measurement. The utility of the new shapes is demonstrated by diffusion tensor measurements of human white matter in vivo over the range of 30‐75 Hz with a b‐value of nearly 1000 s/mm2, using a high‐performance gradient insert. However, the improvement should increase the sampling precision of OGSE experiments for all gradient systems.
To address the long echo times and relatively weak diffusion sensitization that typically limit oscillating gradient spin-echo (OGSE) experiments, an OGSE implementation combining spiral readouts, gap-filled oscillating gradient shapes providing stronger diffusion encoding, and a high-performance gradient system is developed here and utilized to investigate the tradeoff between b-value and maximum OGSE frequency in measurements of diffusion dispersion (i.e., the frequency dependence of diffusivity) in the in vivo human brain. In addition, to assess the effects of the marginal flow sensitivity introduced by these OGSE waveforms, flow-compensated variants are devised for experimental comparison.Methods: Using DTI sequences, OGSE acquisitions were performed on three volunteers at b-values of 300, 500, and 1000 s/mm 2 and frequencies up to 125, 100, and 75 Hz, respectively; scans were performed for gap-filled oscillating gradient shapes with and without flow sensitivity. Pulsed gradient spin-echo DTI acquisitions were also performed at each b-value. Upon reconstruction, mean diffusivity (MD) maps and maps of the diffusion dispersion rate were computed. Results:The power law diffusion dispersion model was found to fit best to MD measurements acquired at b = 1000 s/mm 2 despite the associated reduction of the spectral range; this observation was consistent with Monte Carlo simulations.Furthermore, diffusion dispersion rates without flow sensitivity were slightly higher than flow-sensitive measurements. Conclusion:The presented OGSE implementation provided an improved depiction of diffusion dispersion and demonstrated the advantages of measuring dispersion at higher b-values rather than higher frequencies within the regimes employed in this study.
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