Jenny Chen¹, Benjamin Ades-aron¹, Hong-Hsi Lee¹, Durga Kullakanda¹, Saurabh Maithani¹, Dmitry S. Novikov¹, Jelle Veraart¹, and Els Fieremans^1
1Radiology, NYU School Of Medicine, New York, NY, United States

Diffusion MRI is prone to various artifacts such as noise, eddy current artifacts, and Gibbs ringing. This study compares diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI) parameter estimates among healthy subjects in their 20s to 80s using a minimal diffusion pre-processing approach from Human Connectome Project (HCP) and two DESIGNER (Diffusion parameter EStImation with Gibbs and NoisE Removal) pipelines, which corrects for additional imaging artifacts HCP pipeline does not account for. Our results show that preprocessing quantitatively impacts parameter estimation as well as alters observed age correlations.