Diffusion Microscopist Simulator - The Development and Application of a Monte Carlo Simulation System for Diffusion MRI

• Main Authors: Chun-Hung Yeh, 葉俊宏
• Other Authors: Ching-Po Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35589724430833545799

博士 === 國立陽明大學 === 生物醫學影像暨放射科學系暨研究所 === 100 === Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) has made a significant breakthrough in neurological disorders and brain research thanks to its exquisite sensitivity to tissue cytoarchitecture. However, as the water diffusion process in neuronal tissues is a complex biophysical phenomena at molecular scale, it is difficult to infer tissue microscopic characteristics on a voxel scale from dMRI data. The major methodological contribution of this thesis is the development of an integrated and generic Monte Carlo simulation framework, ‘Diffusion Microscopist Simulator' (DMS), which has the capacity to create 3D biological tissue models of various shapes and properties, as well as to synthesize dMRI data for a large variety of MRI methods, pulse sequence design and parameters. DMS aims at bridging the gap between the elementary diffusion processes occurring at a micrometric scale and the resulting diffusion signal measured at millimetric scale, providing better insights into the features observed in dMRI, as well as offering ground-truth information for optimization and validation of dMRI acquisition protocols for different applications. We have verified the performance and validity of DMS through various benchmark experiments, and applied to address particular research topics in dMRI. Based on DMS, there are two major application contributions in this thesis. First, we use DMS to investigate the impact of finite diffusion gradient pulse duration (delta) on fibre orientation estimation in dMRI. We propose that current practice of using long delta, which is enforced by the hardware limitation of clinical MRI scanners, is actually beneficial for mapping fibre orientations, even though it violates the underlying assumption made in q-space theory. Second, we employ DMS to investigate the feasibility of estimating axon radius using a clinical MRI system. The results suggest that the algorithm for mapping the direct microstructures is applicable to dMRI data acquired from standard MRI scanners.