Crossing fibers, diffractions and nonhomogeneous magnetic field: correction of artifacts by bipolar gradient pulses

In recent years, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and its variants have been used to describe fiber orientations and q-space diffusion MR was proposed as a means to obtain structural information on a micron scale. Therefore, there is an increasing need for complex phantoms with predictable microcharacteristics to challenge different indices extracted from the different diffusion MR techniques used. The present study examines the effect of diffusion pulse sequence on the signal decay and diffraction patterns observed in q-space diffusion MR performed on micron-scale phantoms of different geometries and homogeneities. We evaluated the effect of the pulse gradient stimulated-echo, the longitudinal eddy current delay (LED) and the bipolar LED (BPLED) pulse sequences. Interestingly, in the less homogeneous samples, the expected diffraction patterns were observed only when diffusion was measured with the BPLED sequence. We demonstrated the correction ability of bipolar diffusion gradients and showed that more accurate physical parameters are obtained when such a diffusion gradient scheme is used. These results suggest that bipolar gradient pulses may result in more accurate data if incorporated into conventional diffusion-weighted imaging and DTI.