Myelin water imaging depends on white matter fiber orientation in the human brain

The multiexponential T 2 decay of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) signal from cerebral white matter can be separated into short components sensitive to myelin water and long components related to intra- and extracellular water. In this study we investigated to what degree the myelin water fraction (MWF) depends on the angle between white matter fibers and the main magnetic filed. Maps of MWF were acquired using multi echo CPMG and GRASE sequences. The CPMG sequence was acquired with a TR of 1073 ms, 1500 ms and 2000 ms. The fiber orientation was mapped with diffusion tensor imaging. By angle-wise pooling the voxels across the brain’s white matter, an orientation dependent MWF curve was generated. We found that MWF varied between 25% and 35% across different fiber orientations. The orientation dependency of the MWF is characterized by a dipole-dipole interaction model. Furthermore, the selection of the TR influences the orientation dependent and global white matter MWF. White matter fiber orientation induces a strong systematic bias on the estimation of MWF. This finding has important implications for future research and the interpretation of MWI results in previously published studies.