Improving clinical application of cardiac diffusion tensor MRI
Abstract  Magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (MRDTI), also known as DTI, has emerged as a powerful non-invasive tool for mapping the orientation-dependent microanatomical organization of fibrous organs such as brain white matter and myocardium. To do so, it elegantly relates the self-diffusion of water molecules that undergo Brownian motion to proton spin relaxation MR signals. In this talk it will be shown how DTI can shed some light on the left-ventricular micro-structural remodeling following hypertensive disease. A framework for the voxelwise registration-based characterization of cardiac disease will be considered. Population and longitudinal studies may benefit from such a scheme. Results from a comparison study will be presented juxtaposing the performance of three tensor distance functions. The selection of a tensor distance function resides in the foundation of the tensor-variate framework, critically affecting many operations in the six-dimensional space of diffusion tensors. This seminar will end by discussing how sparsifying transforms can be used in conjunction with compressive sensing reconstruction to shorten acquisition times.