In vivo diffusion kurtosis imaging of rat brain

Abstract

Owing to the heterogeneity of biological system, particular brain tissues, water diffusion is often non-gaussian in nature. In other words, simply by performing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) might not be sufficient to characterize the in vivo environment. It is therefore useful to measure the non-gaussian property of the water diffusion in biological tissues. We therefore performed diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI), which measures the deviation of water diffusion from Gaussian distribution, in rodent brain for comparing whether parameter maps obtained from DKI would be more informative than DTI in animals.