Study on Cerebral Infarction in Rat Brain with Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging

摘要

Diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI) is increasingly used to characterize the degree to which water in biological structure diffuses in a non-Gaussian behavior. Because non-Gaussian behavior represents tissue complexity, DKI can be employed to measure tissue's microstructure. The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility of DKI in cerebral infarction on rat models, and further explore the clinical diagnosis value in aspects of revealing stroke lesions and classifying cerebral infarction of different stages quantitatively. Using 9 different b-values (0, 400-3200 s/mm~2), non-Gaussian kurtosis (yielding both apparent diffusion coefficient D_(app) and apparent kurtosis coefficient K_(app)) fits were performed on a voxel-byvoxel basis. Ischemia tissues present a relatively high signal on mean kurtosis (MK) map. MK map shows more pathological information of cerebral infarction than apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map. rMK (rMK = lesion MK value/ the contralateral part MK value) values evolve regularly in different stages of infarct, which may help in clinical diagnosis.