Overview

The introduction of the diffusion tensor model more than ten years ago has enabled the quantitative description of water diffusion in anisotropic and heterogeneous organs such as the brain. New approaches for quantitative diffusion measurements that go beyond the tensor model have also been recently proposed and rapidly applied in human studies. Diffusion MRI, once limited to the investigation stroke, is now widely used for the study of normal brain anatomy as well as for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. This effervescent development of new diffusion MRI applications has opened new challenges in experimental design, data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation.

Key outcomes of this workshop will be:

a)      Identification of optimal strategies for answering specific clinical questions

b)      Identification of critical improvements needed in data acquisition and analysis methods

c)      Propose standards for reporting diffusion MRI studies to enable comparison of data from different centers.