The Effect of Resolution and Voxel Size on SNR for Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging

The purpose of this work is to characterize how SNR varies with slice thickness for a given in-plane resolution for cDTI. We observed that noise in cDTI is largely physiological dominated such that increasing voxel volume yields smaller gains in SNR than what is observed in a phantom. More specifically, increased slice thickness did not significantly improve cDTI metric maps for a given in-plane resolution. However, higher in-plane resolution improved MD and FA maps. Therefore, future work will evaluate the optimal in-plane resolution and slice thickness.