Analytical model of susceptibility-induced MR signal dephasing: Effect of diffusion in a microvascular network

Spin echo formation in muscle tissue

Determination of the spin echo signal evolution and of transverse relaxation rates is of high importance for microstructural modeling of muscle tissue in magnetic resonance imaging. So far, numerically exact solutions for the NMR signal dynamics in muscle tissue models have been reported only for the gradient echo free induction decay, with spin echo problems usually solved by approximate methods. In this work, we modeled the spin echo signal numerically exact by discretizing the radial dimension of the Bloch-Torrey equation and expanding the angular dependency in terms of even Chebyshev polynomials. This allows us to express the time dependence of the local magnetization as a closed-form matrix expression. Using this method, we were able to accurately capture the spin echo local and total magnetization dynamics. The obtained transverse relaxation rates showed a high concordance with random walker and finite-element simulations. We could demonstrate that in cases of smaller diffusion coefficients, the commonly used strong collision approximation significantly underestimates the true value considerably. Instead, the limiting behavior in this regime is correctly described either by the full solution or by the slow diffusion approximation. Experimentally measured transverse relaxation rates of a mouse limb muscle showed an angular dependence in accordance with the theoretical prediction.