Modelling of Crossing and Kissing in Diffusion MRI
The principal objective of this work is to evaluate and revise an existing diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) simulation to allow for resolution of similar, but inherently different fiber geometries. We believe that, despite the current limited ability of dMRI to resolve crossing and kissing fiber geometries, there is necessarily a difference in the underlying phase distributions of these populations as a water molecule in a kissing structure constituent will be exposed to a smaller gradient range than one in a fiber of a crossing structure. Further, we posit that this discrepancy will be detectable for some subset of dMRI gradient parameters. Developing insight into resolving fibers to this degree would be of notable significance with regard to improving tractographic representations of the brain. Ultimately, model evaluation and revision has come down to writing MATLAB code to investigate edge cases and improve shortcomings. While strides have been made in the progression of the simulator, we have yet to reach the stage of simulation and data analysis, therefore, there aren’t results to note at this point.