Characterization of White and Gray Matters in healthy brain: An in-vivo Diffusion Kurtosis Imaging study

The extensions of diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) technique such as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and Diffusion Kurtosis Imaging (DKI) are useful in understanding the complex cellular micro-structures non-invasively. DTI is used to quantify the three-dimensional water diffusion in biological tissues by assuming the diffusion to be Gaussian, whereas DKI which is an extension of DTI, quantifies the deviation of water diffusion from Gaussian model. In this study, we focus on finding the correlation between DTI and DKI parameters for characterizing the brain regions such as White Matter (WM) and Gray Matter (GM) of healthy human brain. The data obtained from DKI scans on nine healthy volunteers are used in this study. Parameters such as Mean Kurtosis (MK) and Fractional Anisotropy (FA) were estimated for the two brain regions, WM and GM. Correlation analysis was performed between MK and FA in WM and GM. Significant differences in correlation results were observed for WM and GM. These preliminary findings indicate that this correlation measure could be used to characterize WM and GM regions in normal human brain. This could be used in applications such as segmentation of WM and GM and additionally bear potential for discriminating pathologies.