English

MR-WAVES: MR Water-diffusion And Vascular Effects Simulations

Medical Physics 2025-07-09 v1 Biological Physics

Abstract

Accurate MR signal simulation, including microvascular structures and water diffusion, is crucial for MRI techniques like fMRI BOLD modeling and MR vascular Fingerprinting (MRF), which use susceptibility effects on MR signals for tissue characterization. However, integrating microvascular features and diffusion remains computationally challenging, limiting the accuracy of the estimates. Using advanced modeling and deep neural networks, we propose a novel simulation tool that efficiently accounts for susceptibility and diffusion effects. We used dimension reduction of magnetic field inhomogeneity matrices combined with deep learning method to accelerate the simulations while maintaining their accuracy. We validated our results through an in silico study against a reference method and in vivo MRF experiments. This approach accelerates MR signal generation by a factor of almost 13,000 compared to previously used simulation methods while preserving accuracy. The MR-WAVES method allows fast generation of MR signals accounting for microvascular structures and water-diffusion contribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.01318,
  title  = {MR-WAVES: MR Water-diffusion And Vascular Effects Simulations},
  author = {Thomas Coudert and Maitê Silva Martins Marçal and Aurélien Delphin and Antoine Barrier and Lila Cunge and Loïc Legris and Jan M Warnking and Benjamin Lemasson and Emmanuel L Barbier and Thomas Christen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01318},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Main text: 10 pages, 8 figures, 1 table Submitted to Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (March 2025) The source code for our implementation is available here https://github.com/ThomasCoudert/MR-WAVES-public

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:04:18.298Z