Anistropic sampling shape of white matter microstructure cannot cheat the diffusional kurtosis

Diffusion kurtosis imaging is a newly developed diffusion MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) technique and becoming increasingly valuable in clinic. Despite low-resolution sampling are commonly used to cover the unsteadiness of kurtosis estimation, but the influence of the sampling shape has not been verified. In this paper, different acquisitions of isotropic and anisotropic sampling voxel were applied, and the influence on various white matter structures was observed. Fiber tracking, T-test and linearly regression analysis were used to quantify the difference. Significant difference (p<;0.01) in fractional anisotropic level was found but not in kurtosis. The result here can provide a basis for higher resolution of kurtosis mapping as well as higher quality, which may be great of significance in clinical examination.