Jessica McKay

BY JESSICA MCKAY

This month’s Editor’s Pick features a project that makes kurtosis imaging more accessible to clinicians and researchers, alike, from a group in Denmark that includes our interviewees: Brian Hansen and Sune Jespersen. Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) increases sensitivity to microstructural changes by extending the diffusion signal expression to account for non-Gaussian effects, but it typically requires time-consuming acquisitions with high diffusion weighting. Brian and Sune’s group had previously described a fast protocol, referred to as the 1-3-9 scheme, that includes three diffusion directions at a low b-value to determine the mean diffusivity and 9 specific diffusion directions at a higher b-value to calculate mean kurtosis [Hansen et al. MRM 69, 2013]. In this work, they extend the protocol to make it more robust to experimental imperfections by acquiring all 9 directions at the lower b-value, which they call 1-9-9. They further characterize the optimum b-values and propose a method to correct for imperfect diffusion directions. Keep reading to find out how their acquisition scheme expands the clinical value and feasibility of kurtosis imaging and you may even be inspired to add this ~1-minute scan onto your own protocol.