On the sensitivity of the diffusion MRI signal to brain activity in response to a motor cortex paradigm

TL;DR

This study investigates how diffusion MRI signals relate to brain activity during a motor task, revealing that dfMRI detects changes in diffusion and perfusion, offering more spatially confined activation maps than traditional fMRI.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel acquisition and analysis scheme to disentangle perfusion, free-water, and T2 effects in dfMRI during a motor task, clarifying the sources of dfMRI signals.

Findings

dfMRI and ADC-fMRI show smaller activation clusters than BOLD fMRI.

Perfusion increases are observed during task in dfMRI and ADC-fMRI.

Perfusion effects are significant in less than 25% of activation regions.

Abstract

Diffusion functional MRI (dfMRI) is a promising technique to map functional activations by acquiring diffusion-weighed spin-echo images. In previous studies, dfMRI showed higher spatial accuracy at activation mapping compared to classic functional MRI approaches. However, it remains unclear whether dfMRI measures result from changes in the intra-/extracellular environment, perfusion and/or T2 values. We designed an acquisition/quantification scheme to disentangle such effects in the motor cortex during a finger tapping paradigm. dfMRI was acquired at specific diffusion weightings to selectively suppress perfusion and free-water diffusion, then times series of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC-fMRI) and of the perfusion signal fraction (IVIM-fMRI) were derived. ADC-fMRI provided ADC estimates sensitive to changes in perfusion and free-water volume, but not to T2/T2* values. With IVIM-fMRI we isolated the perfusion contribution to ADC, while suppressing T2 effects. Compared to conventional gradient-echo BOLD fMRI, activation maps obtained with dfMRI and ADC-fMRI had smaller clusters, and the spatial overlap between the three techniques was below 50%. Increases of perfusion fractions were observed during task in both dfMRI and ADC-fMRI activations. Perfusion effects were more prominent with ADC-fMRI than with dfMRI but were significant in less than 25% of activation ROIs. Taken together, our results suggest that the sensitivity to task of dfMRI derives from a decrease of hindered diffusion and an increase of the pseudo-diffusion signal fraction, leading to different, more confined spatial activation patterns compared to classic functional MRI.