Quantitative investigation of cardiac motion effects on in vivo diffusion tensor parameters: a simulation study

Background Cardiac motion is a crucial problem in in vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the human heart. Despite its importance, the effects of cardiac motion on diffusion tensor parameters of the human heart in vivo have not been well established, mainly because of large signal loss. Recently, an efficient method was proposed that acquires cardiac diffusion weighted (DW) images at different time points of the cardiac cycle and reduces motion-induced signal loss using PCA filtering and temporal MIP techniques (PCATMIP) (Rapacchi, Invest Radiol 2011). Meanwhile, polarized light imaging (PLI) provides us the ground-truth of the heart fiber architecture, and DENSE sequence offers us higher spatial resolution displacement fields of the human heart in vivo. These different imaging possibilities have led us to investigate a multimodal approach to quantitatively investigate the effects of cardiac motion on diffusion tensor parameters such as