To explore the properties of short-T 2 signals in human brain, investigate the impact of various experimental procedures on these properties, and evaluate the performance of three-component analysis. Methods: Eight samples of non-pathological human brain tissue were subjected to different combinations of experimental procedures including D 2 O exchange and frozen storage. Short-T 2 imaging techniques were employed to acquire multi-TE (33-2067 μs) data, to which a three-component complex model was fitted in two steps to recover the properties of the underlying signal components and produce amplitude maps of each component. For validation of the component amplitude maps, the samples underwent immunohistochemical myelin staining. Results:The signal component representing the myelin bilayer exhibited super-exponential decay with T 2,min of 5.48 μs and a chemical shift of 1.07 ppm, and its amplitude could be successfully mapped in both white and gray matter in all samples. These myelin maps corresponded well to myelin-stained tissue sections. Gray matter signals exhibited somewhat different components than white matter signals, but both tissue types were well represented by the signal model. Frozen tissue storage did not alter the signal components but influenced component amplitudes. D 2 O exchange was necessary to characterize the non-aqueous signal components, but component amplitude mapping could be reliably performed also in the presence of H 2 O signals. Conclusions:The myelin mapping approach explored here produced reasonable and stable results for all samples. The extensive tissue and methodological investigations performed in this work form a basis for signal interpretation in future studies both ex vivo and in vivo.
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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