White matter is the brain tissue that consists of bundles of axons that carry nerve impulses between neurons. White matter is important because it maintains structual network connectivity in the brain. Properties of white matter may be studied in-vivo and non-invasively by diffusion MRI, which measures diffusion characteristics of water in the network. Brain diffusion MRI, however, is a challenging methodology.

We study how diffusion MRI acquisition parameters, data preprocessing and analysis methods affect quality and reproducibility of the derived quantitative information. We implement and evaluate harmonized multi-site MRI acquisition and analysis protocols for longitudinal brain diffusion studies. More recently we have also started to evaluate novel advanced diffusion modelling methods, like spherical deconvolution.

Selected work:

• Kreilkamp B., Zacà D., Papinutto N, Jovicich J. Retrospective head motion correction approaches for DTI: effects of pre-processing choices on biases and reproducibility of scalar diffusion metrics. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (2015, in press).
   
• Jovicich J*, Marizzoni M*, Bosch B, Bartrés-Faz D, Arnold J, Benninghoff J,Wiltfang J, Roccatagliata L, Picco A, Nobili F, Blin O, Bombois S, Lopes R, Bordet R, Chanoine V, Ranjeva JP, Didic M, Gros-Dagnac H, Payoux P, Zoccatelli G, Alessandrini F, Beltramello A, Bargalló N, Ferretti A, Caulo M, Aiello M, Ragucci M, Soricelli A, Salvadori N, Tarducci R, Floridi P, Tsolaki M, Constantinidis M, Drevelegas A, Rossini PM, Marra C, Otto J, Reiss-Zimmermann M, Hoffmann KT, Galluzzi S, Frisoni GB; PharmaCog Consortium. Multisite Longitudinal Reliability of Tract-Based Spatial Statistics in Diffusion Tensor Imaging of Healthy Elderly Subjects. Neuroimage 2014;101:390-403. (*equally contributing authors) (PubMed)

• Papinutto N., Maule F., Jovicich J., Reproducibility and biases in high field brain diffusion MRI: an evaluation of acquisition and analysis variables. Magn Reson. Imag. 201; 31(6):827-39. (PubMed)