Cumulant expansion framework for internal gradient distributions tensors

Magnetic resonance imaging is a powerful, non invasive tool for medical diagnosis. The low sensitivity for detecting the nuclear spin signals, typically limits the image resolution to several tens of micrometers in preclinical systems and millimeters in clinical scanners. Other sources of information, derived from diffusion processes of intrinsic molecules such as water in the tissues, allow getting morphological information at micrometric and submicrometric scales as potential biomarkers of several pathologies. Here we consider extracting this morphological information by probing the distribution of internal magnetic field gradients induced by the heterogeneous magnetic susceptibility of the medium. We use a cumulant expansion to derive the dephasing on the spin signal induced by the molecules that explore these internal gradients while diffusing. Based on the cumulant expansion, we define internal gradient distributions tensors (IGDT) and propose modulating gradient spin echo sequences to probe them. These IGDT contain microstructural morphological information that characterize porous media and biological tissues. We evaluate the IGDT effects on the magnetization decay with typical conditions of brain tissue and show that their effects can be experimentally observed. Our results thus provide a framework for exploiting IGDT as quantitative diagnostic tools.