The present study assesses the effects of cross-term interactions between diffusion and imaging gradients in magnetic resonance imaging q-space analysis, and corrects for those effects for both spin echo and stimulated echo diffusionweighted sequences. These corrections are demonstrated experimentally in unrestricted media for water and theoretically by simulating the case of restricted diffusion in a sphere. By correcting for the cross-term interactions, large imaging gradients can be used without compromising the results. Ignoring cross-term interactions could lead to a misunderstanding of the q-space analysis; for instance, the microstructural size of the sample could be overestimated, or isotropic media could be misinterpreted as being anisotropic. In the early 1990s Callaghan (1) and Cory and Garroway (2) demonstrated that structural information too small to be detected by conventional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods can be inferred from the measurement of water diffusion. Their studies demonstrated that the echo attenuation in a spin echo sequence due to the effect of a pair of finite duration diffusion pulse field gradients, separated by a long diffusion time, could be related to the displacement probability of the observed spins following Fourier transformation (FT) of the echo intensity, E(q), with respect to the so-called "reciprocal spatial vector," q. This technique was termed q-space imaging, and it has since been used almost exclusively in bulk NMR spectroscopy. Recently, however, q-space imaging has been extended both to localized NMR spectroscopy (3) and to MRI (3-5).If additional magnetic field gradients (e.g., imaging gradients) are introduced into the diffusion sequence, however, these may contribute to the diffusion weighting, which in turn may translate into greater echo attenuation than would be expected from the diffusion gradients alone. This interaction between the imaging gradients and diffusion gradients is well known in standard diffusionweighted imaging (DWI) (7-9) and is generally referred to as "cross-term interaction." If those interactions are not accounted for in the experimental analysis, misinterpretation of the data can easily occur, particularly when the q-space experiments are performed using strong imaging gradients.For standard DWI experiments, Neeman et al. (7) and Eis and Hoehn-Berlage (8) solved this problem for unidirectional diffusion measurements, whereas Mattiello et al. (9) have done so for diffusion tensor measurements. However, if the q-space technique is to be implemented successfully in conjunction with imaging gradients, the cross-term interactions must also be evaluated for this sequence. In the present study, expressions for calculation of corrected qvalues, which account for cross-term interactions with imaging gradients, were derived and the practical implications of the imaging gradients in q-space imaging were examined. These corrections were determined for two sequences commonly used in q-space analysis, namely, the spin echo (10) and stimulat...