Optimal Experiment Design for Mono-Exponential Model Fitting: Application to Apparent Diffusion Coefficient Imaging

Journal article, 2015

The mono-exponential model is widely used in quantitative biomedical imaging. Notable applications include apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) imaging and pharmacokinetics.The application of ADC imaging to the detection of malignant tissue has in turn prompted several studies concerning optimal experiment design for mono-exponential model fitting. In this paper, we propose a new experiment design method that is based on minimizing the determinant of the covariance matrix of the estimated parameters (𝐷-optimal design). In contrast to previous methods, 𝐷-optimal design is independent of the imaged quantities. Applying this method to ADC imaging, we demonstrate its steady performance for the whole range of input variables (imaged parameters, number of measurements, range of 𝑏-values). Using Monte Carlo simulations we show that the 𝐷-optimal design outperforms existing experiment design methods in terms of accuracy and precision of the estimated parameters.