Preclinical MRI approaches constitute a key tool to study a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, allowing a more direct investigation of the disorder substrate and, at the same time, the possibility of back-translating such findings to human subjects. However, the lack of consensus on the optimal experimental scheme used to acquire the data has led to relatively high heterogeneity in the choice of protocols, which can potentially impact the comparison between results obtained by different groups, even using the same animal model. This is especially true for diffusion-weighted MRI data, where certain experimental choices can impact not only on the accuracy and precision of the extracted biomarkers, but also on their biological meaning. With this in mind, we extensively examined preclinical imaging studies that used diffusion-weighted MRI to investigate neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in rodent models. In this review, we discuss the main findings for each preclinical model, with a special focus on the analysis and comparison of the different acquisition strategies used across studies and their impact on the heterogeneity of the findings.

临床前MRI方法是研究多种神经病学和精神病学疾病的关键工具，可以更直接地研究疾病的底物，同时还可以将这些发现反向转化为人类受试者。但是，对于用于获取数据的最佳实验方案缺乏共识，导致协议选择上的异质性较高，甚至可能使用相同的动物模型，也可能影响不同小组获得的结果之间的比较。对于扩散加权MRI数据尤其如此，其中某些实验选择不仅会影响提取的生物标志物的准确性和精确度，还会影响其生物学意义。考虑到这一点，我们广泛研究了临床前影像学研究，这些研究使用扩散加权MRI来研究啮齿动物模型中的神经退行性，神经发育和精神疾病。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了每种临床前模型的主要发现，特别着重于分析和比较研究中使用的不同获取策略及其对发现异质性的影响。