Trading Off Averages and Directions for Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging

The objective of this work was to control the total number of collected diffusion weighted images (DWI) across several different acquisition schemes to evaluate which combination of directions and averages provides the highest quality data. In vivo cDTI data was collected in volunteers (N=5) using a series of fixed duration protocols that span a range of diffusion directions and signal averages. We found that balancing the number of diffusion directions (12-20) and averages (5-3) allows for robust quantification of mean diffusivity, fractional anisotropy, and helix measurements in a fixed scan time.