Molecular diffusion measured with diffusion weighted MRI (DWI) offers a probe for tissue microstructure. However, inferring microstructural properties from conventional DWI data is a complex inverse problem and has to account for heterogeneity in sizes, shapes and orientations of the tissue compartments contained within an imaging voxel. Alternative experimental means for disentangling the signal signatures of such features could provide a stronger link between the data and its interpretation. Double diffusion encoding (DDE) offers the possibility to factor out variation in compartment shapes from orientational dispersion of anisotropic domains by measuring the correlation between diffusivity in multiple directions. Time dependence of the diffusion is another effect reflecting the dimensions and distributions of barriers. In this paper we extend on DDE with a modified version of the oscillating gradient spin echo (OGSE) experiment, giving a basic contrast mechanism closely linked to both the temporal diffusion spectrum and the compartment anisotropy. We demonstrate our new method on post mortem brain tissue and show that we retrieve the correct temporal diffusion tensor spectrum in synthetic data from Monte Carlo simulations of random walks in a range of disordered geometries of different sizes and shapes.

Purpose: We investigated the impact on Computed Tomography (CT) image quality and photon, electron and proton head-and-neck (H&N) radiotherapy (RT) dose calculations of three CT metal artifact reduction (MAR) approaches: A CT-based algorithm (oMAR Philips Healthcare), manual water override and our recently presented, Magnetic Resonance (MR)-based kerMAR algorithm. We considered three hypotheses: I: Manual water override improves MAR over the CT- and MR-based alternatives; II: The automatic algorithms (oMAR and kerMAR) improve MAR over the uncorrected CT; III: kerMAR improves MAR over oMAR. Methods: We included a veal shank phantom with/without 6 metal inserts and 9 H&N RT patients with dental implants. We quantified the MAR capabilities by the reduction of outliers in the CT value distribution in regions of interest, and the change in particle range and photon depth at maximum dose. Results: Water override provided apparent image improvements in the soft tissue region but insignificantly or negatively influenced the dose calculations. We however found significant improvements in image quality and particle range impact, compared to the uncorrected CT, when using oMAR and kerMAR. kerMAR in turn provided superior improvements in terms of high intensity streak suppression compared to oMAR, again with associated impacts on the particle range estimates. Conclusion: We found no benefits of the water override compared to the rest, and tentatively reject hypothesis I. We however found improvements with the automatic algorithms, and thus support for hypothesis II, and found the MR-based kerMAR to improve upon oMAR, supporting hypothesis III.

Metal implants give rise to metal artifacts in computed tomography (CT) images, which may lead to diagnostic errors and erroneous CT number estimates when the CT is used for radiation therapy planning. Methods for reducing metal artifacts by exploiting the anatomical information provided by coregistered magnetic resonance (MR) images are of great potential value, but remain technically challenging due to the poor contrast between bone and air on the MR image. In this paper, we present a novel MR-based algorithm for automatic CT metal artifact reduction (MAR), referred to as kerMAR. It combines kernel regression on known CT value/MR patch pairs in the uncorrupted patient volume with a forward model of the artifact corrupted values to estimate CT replacement values. In contrast to pseudo-CT generation that builds on multi-patient modelling, the algorithm requires no MR intensity normalisation or atlas registration. Image results for 7 head-and-neck radiation therapy patients with T1-weighted images acquired in the same fixation as the RT planning CT suggest a potential for more complete MAR close to the metal implants than the oMAR algorithm (Philips) used clinically. Our results further show improved performance in air and bone regions as compared to other MR-based MAR algorithms. In addition, we experimented with using kerMAR to define a prior for iterative reconstruction with the maximum likelihood transmission reconstruction algorithm, however with no apparent improvements