Transmural gradients of preferential diffusion motility in the normal rat myocardium characterized by diffusion tensor imaging

Background In recent years, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has emerged as a powerful noninvasive tool that infers the cardiac tissue organization through measuring water molecule motility.[1] Previous DTI studies [2] on normal hearts largely assumed that the measured diffusion magnitude along the 3 preferred directions and the measured degree of diffusion anisotropy remain the same over the endo-, meso-, and epi-cardial layers of the left ventricular (LV) wall. Our goal is to test the validity of this assumption.