Abstract
Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance spectroscopy (DWS) offers unique access to compartment-specific microstructural information on tissue, and potentially sensitive detection of compartment-specific changes in disease. The specificity of DWS is, however, offset by its relative low sensitivity, intrinsic to all MRS-based methods, and further exacerbated by the signal loss due to the diffusion weighting and long echo times. In this work we first provide an experimental example for the type of compartment-specific information that can be obtained with DWS from a small volume of interest (VOI) in brain white matter. We then propose and discuss a strategy for the analysis of DWS data, which includes the use of models of diffusion in compartments with simple geometries. We conclude with a broader discussion of the potential role of DWS in the characterization of tissue microstructure and the complementarity of DWS with less-specific but more sensitive microstructural tools such as diffusion tensor imaging.
Highlights
The characteristic dimensions of microstructural features of living tissue are several orders of magnitude smaller than the typical spatial resolution obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
The ubiquity of water in living tissue (∼65% in volume) accounts for the high sensitivity of MRI when compared to MR of other tissue constituents, but the lack of compartmental-specificity complicates the interpretation of DW-MRI results
A more direct way to tackle the issue of compartment-specificity is to measure the diffusion properties of endogenous spin species that reside in specific tissue compartments and are concentrated enough to yield a visible MR signal with reasonable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
Summary
C.J. Gorter Center for High Field MRI, Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands. Oregon Health and Science University, USA Dost Ongur, McLean Hospital, USA Julien Valette, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, France. Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance spectroscopy (DWS) offers unique access to compartment-specific microstructural information on tissue, and potentially sensitive detection of compartment-specific changes in disease. The specificity of DWS is, offset by its relative low sensitivity, intrinsic to all MRS-based methods, and further exacerbated by the signal loss due to the diffusion weighting and long echo times. We conclude with a broader discussion of the potential role of DWS in the characterization of tissue microstructure and the complementarity of DWS with less-specific but more sensitive microstructural tools such as diffusion tensor imaging
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