Restriction-induced time-dependent transcytolemmal water exchange: Revisiting the K\"arger exchange model

The K\"arger model and its derivatives have been widely used to incorporate transcytolemmal water exchange rate, an essential characteristic of living cells, into analyses of diffusion MRI (dMRI) signals from tissues. The K\"arger model consists of two homogeneous exchanging components coupled by an exchange rate constant and assumes measurements are made with sufficiently long diffusion time and slow water exchange. Despite successful applications, it remains unclear whether these assumptions are generally valid for practical dMRI sequences and biological tissues. In particular, barrier-induced restrictions to diffusion produce inhomogeneous magnetization distributions in relatively large-sized compartments such as cancer cells, violating the above assumptions. The effects of this inhomogeneity are usually overlooked. We performed computer simulations to quantify how restriction effects, which in images produce edge enhancements at compartment boundaries, influence different variants of the K\"arger-model. The results show that the edge enhancement effect will produce larger, time-dependent estimates of exchange rates in e. g. , tumors with relatively large cell sizes (>10 m), resulting in overestimations of water exchange as previously reported. Moreover, stronger diffusion gradients, longer diffusion gradient durations, and larger cell sizes, all cause more pronounced edge enhancement effects. This helps us to better understand the feasibility of the K\"arger model in estimating water exchange in different tissue types and provides useful guidance on signal acquisition methods that may mitigate the edge enhancement effect. This work also indicates the need to correct the overestimated transcytolemmal water exchange rates obtained assuming the K\"arger-model.