The estimation of the partial volume fraction (PVF) of free water (FW) inside brain tissues, and specifically inside the white matter (WM), serves two purposes in diffusion MRI: first, eliminating a confounding factor within diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), 1 which emanates from the limited resolution of diffusion weighted images (DWIs). 2 Second, the FW-PVF itself can be a biological marker for the description of tumorous edema, neuro-inflammation, and others. 3,4 Several techniques for FW-PVF estimation have been proposed that can be classified depending on the kind of DWI collections they employ: micro-structure oriented methods like NODDI, 5 spherical means, 6 or MiSFIT 7 consider multi-shells, that is, few medium-high b-values (∼2-4, up to 10, 000 s∕mm 2 ) with ∼64-128 gradient directions each; spectral methods 8,9 manage large sets (∼15) of low-medium

The term free-water volume fraction (FWVF) refers to the cerebrospinal and interstitial fluids in the extracellular space of the white matter (WM) of the brain, which has been demonstrated as a sensitive biomarker that correlates with the cognitive performance and the neuropathological processes modifying the interstitial extracellular spaces. It can be quantified by properly fitting the isotropic compartment of the magnetic resonance (MR) signal in diffusion-sensitized sequences. Using N = 287 healthy subjects aged 25-94, this study examines in detail the evolution of the FWVF in the human brain WM across the adult lifespan, which has been previously reported to exhibit a positive trend. We found evidence of a noticeably non-linear gain after the sixth decade of life, with a region-specific variate and varying change rate of the FWVF parameter with age, at the same time a heteroskedastic pattern across the adult lifespan is suggested. On the other hand, the FW-compensated MR signal leads to a region-dependent flattened age-related evolution of the mean diffusivity (MD) and fractional anisotropy (FA), along with a considerable reduction in their variability, as compared to standard studies conducted over the raw MR signal. This way, our study provides a new perspective on the trajectory-based assessment of the brain and explains the source of the variations observed in FA and MD parameters across the lifespan with previous studies with the standard diffusion tensor imaging.

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PurposeWe propose a method that can provide information about the anisotropy and orientation of diffusion in the brain from only 3 orthogonal gradient directions without imposing additional assumptions.MethodsThe method is based on the Diffusion Anisotropy (DiA) that measures the distance from a diffusion signal to its isotropic equivalent. The original formulation based on a Spherical Harmonics basis allows to go down to only 3 orthogonal directions in order to estimate the measure. In addition, an alternative simplification and a color-coding representation are also proposed.ResultsAcquisitions from a publicly available database are used to test the viability of the proposal. The DiA succeeded in providing anisotropy information from the white matter using only 3 diffusion-encoding directions. The price to pay for such reduced acquisition is an increment in the variability of the data and a subestimation of the metric.ConclusionsThe calculation of anisotropy information from DMRI is feasible using fewer than 6 gradient directions by using DiA. The method is totally compatible with existing acquisition protocols and it may provide complementary information about orientation in fast diffusion acquisitions.

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