2021/08/02 by Justin P. Haldar, Haldar, Justin P.
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications #Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications #FOS: Physical sciences #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #NMR spectroscopy and applications #physics.med-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2108.01188
arxiv created 2021/08/02 · openalex publication_date 2021/08/02 · arxiv updated 2021/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Diffusion-encoded magnetic resonance (MR) experiments can provide important insights into the microstructural characteristics of a variety of biological tissues and other fluid- or gas-filled porous media. The physics of diffusion encoding has been studied extensively over the span of many decades, and many excellent descriptions can be found in the literature -- see, e.g., Refs. [1-5]. However, many of these descriptions spend relatively little time focusing on random process descriptions of the diffusion process, instead relying on different abstractions. In this primer, we describe diffusion-encoded MR experiments from a random process perspective. While the results we derive from this perspective are quite standard (and match the results obtained with other arguments), we expect that the alternative derivations may be insightful for some readers. This primer is intended for technical readers who have a graduate-level understanding of random processes. Readers are also expected to already have good familiarity with the basics of MR, and we anticipate that a signal processing perspective on MR [6] will be especially complementary to the random process perspectives presented herein.