Reproducibility and biases in high field brain diffusion MRI: an evaluation of acquisition and analysis variables

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of in-vivo human brain provides insights into white matter anatomical connectivity, but little is known about measurement difference biases and reliability of data obtained with last generation high field scanners (>3T) as function of MRI acquisition and analyses variables. Here we assess the impact of acquisition (voxel size: 1.8×1.8×1.8, 2×2×2 and 2.5×2.5×2.5mm3, b-value: 700, 1000 and 1300s/mm2) and analysis variables (within-session averaging and co-registration methods) on biases and test-retest reproducibility of some common tensor derived quantities like fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial and radial diffusivity in a group of healthy subjects at 4T in three regions: arcuate fasciculus, corpus callosum and cingulum. Averaging effects are also evaluated on a full-brain voxel based approach. The main results are: i) group FA and MD reproducibility errors across scan sessions are on average double of those found in within-session r...