Abstract
PURPOSE: Our study aimed to develop accelerated microscopic diffusional kurtosis imaging (μDKI) and preliminarily evaluated it in a rodent model of chronic epilepsy. METHODS: We investigated two μDKI acceleration schemes of reduced sampling density and angular range in a phantom and wild-type rats, and further tested μDKI method in pilocarpine-induced epilepsy rats using a 4.7 Tesla MRI. Single slice average μD(app) and μK(app) maps were derived, and Nissl staining was obtained. RESULTS: The kurtosis maps from two accelerated μDKI sampling schemes (sampling density and range) are very similar to that using fully sampled data (SSIM > 0.95). For the epileptic models, μDKI showed noticeably different contrast from those obtained with conventional DKI. Specifically, the average μK(app) was significantly less than that of the average of K(app) (0.15 ± 0.01 vs. 0.47 ± 0.02) in the ventricle. CONCLUSIONS: Our study demonstrated the feasibility of accelerated in vivo μDKI. Our work revealed that μDKI provides complementary information to conventional DKI method, suggesting that advanced DKI sequences are promising to elucidate tissue microstructure in neurological diseases.