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Diffusion MRI provides a noninvasive way to assess tissue microstructure. Based on diffusion MRI, we propose a model‐free method called restricted diffusion imaging (RDI) to quantify restricted diffusion and correlate it with cellularity.

An analytical relation between q‐space signals and the density of restricted spins was derived to quantify restricted diffusion. A phantom study was conducted to investigate the performance of RDI, and RDI was applied to an animal study to assess immune cell infiltration in myocardial tissues with ischemia‐reperfusion injury.

Our phantom study showed a correlation coefficient of 0.998 between cell density and the restricted diffusion quantified by RDI. The animal study also showed that the high‐value regions in RDI matched well with the macrophage infiltration areas in the H&E stained slides. In comparison with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI …