Adaptive anisotropic gaussian filtering to reduce acquisition time in cardiac diffusion tensor imaging.

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Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is used to quantify myocardial fiberorientation based on helicalangles (HA). Accurate HA measurements require multiple excitations (NEX) and/or several diffusion encoding directions (DED). However, increasing NEX and/or DED increases acquisition time (TA). Therefore, in this study, wepropose to reduce TA by implementinga 3D adaptive anisotropic Gaussian filter (AAGF) on the DTI data acquired from ex-vivohealthy and infarcted porcine hearts. DTI was performed onex-vivo hearts [9-healthy, 3-myocardial infarction (MI)] with several combinations of DED and NEX. AAGF, mean (AVF) and median filters (MF) were applied on the primary eigenvectors of the diffusion tensor prior to HA estimation. The performance of AAGF was compared against AVF and MF. Root mean square error (RMSE), concordance correlation-coefficients and Bland-Altman's technique was used to determine optimal combination of DED and NEX that generated the best HA maps in the least possible TA. Lastly, the effect of implementing AAGF on the infarcted porcine hearts was also investigated. RMSE in HA estimation for AAGF was lower compared to AVF or MF. Post-filtering(AAGF) fewer DED and NEX were required to achieve HA maps with similar integrity as those obtained from higher NEX and/or DED. Pathological alterations caused in HA orientation in the MI model were preserved post-filtering(AAGF). Our results demonstrate that AAGF reduces TA without affecting the integrity of the myocardial microstructure.