Beyond DTI: insights in heart infarcted tissue

Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is an advanced clinical imaging technique based upon characterizing the water flow within body tissues. Although models of higher order (HO) than diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have been successfully ap- plied to brain dMRI, the peculiarities of the heart hinder its appli- cation on this muscle. However, these models have been proven as a powerful way to get insights in the microstructure of organs. In this work we have applied both DTI and a HO model to two ex-vivo pig heart acquisitions for measuring their differences in a metric that we call “Non-Gaussianity” and then check how these differences are gathered on infarcted tissue. Further researching may be needed to both confirm this correlation and make these models feasible to clinical practice.