Effects of diffusion weighting schemes on the reproducibility of DTI-derived fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, and principal eigenvector measurements at 1.5T.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is used to study tissue composition and architecture in vivo. To increase the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of DTI contrasts, studies typically use more than the minimum of 6 diffusion weighting (DW) directions or acquire repeated observations of the same set of DW directions. Simulation-based studies have sought to optimize DTI acquisitions and suggest that increasing the directional resolution of a DTI dataset (i.