A second order asymptotic model for diffusion MRI in permeable media

Abstract

Starting from a reference partial differential equation model of the complex transverse water proton magnetization in a voxel due to diffusion-encoding magnetic field gradient pulses, one can use periodic homogenization theory to establish macroscopic models. A previous work introduced an asymptotic model that accounted for permeable interfaces in the imaging medium. In this paper we formulate a higher order asymptotic model to treat higher values of permeability. We explicitly solved this new asymptotic model to obtain a system of ordinary differential equations that can model the diffusion MRI signal and we present numerical results showing the improved accuracy of the new model in the regime of higher permeability.