Motion-compensated diffusion imaging with phase-contrast (MC-DIP) for the quantification of regional cerebral blood flow

Diffusion imaging with phase-contrast (DIP) can quantitatively evaluate regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF), in which total CBF (tCBF) from phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) converts the brain’s perfusion-related diffusion parameters into rCBF values. However, it is sensitive to bulk motion (i.e., brain pulsation), potentially causing an overestimation of DIP-derived rCBF values. To overcome this issue, we propose a motion-compensated DIP (MC-DIP) that incorporates motion-compensated diffusion gradients. DIP with second-order motion-compensated diffusion gradients (2nd-MC-DIP) improved the fitting accuracy of the biexponential analysis and showed the ability to quantitatively evaluate rCBF in gray and white matter.