Reduced field-of-view diffusion-weighted imaging of the brain at 7 T.
Ventral and rostral regions of the brain are of emerging importance for the MRI characterization of early dementia, traumatic brain injury and epilepsy. Unfortunately, standard single-shot echo planar diffusion-weighted imaging of these regions at high fields is contaminated by severe imaging artifacts in the vicinity of air-tissue interfaces. To mitigate these artifacts and improve visualization of the temporal and frontal lobes at 7 T, we applied a reduced field-of-view strategy, enabled by outer volume suppression (OVS) with novel quadratic phase radiofrequency (RF) pulses, combined with partial Fourier and parallel imaging methods. The new acquisition greatly reduced the level of artifacts in six human subjects (including four patients with early symptoms of dementia).
von Morze
Cornelius
C
Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco MC 2512, CA 94158-2512, USA. morze@radiology.ucsf.edu
Kelley
Douglas A C
DA
Shepherd
Timothy M
TM
Banerjee
Suchandrima
S
Xu
Duan
D
Hess
Christopher P
CP
D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D003704:Dementia / Q000473:pathology*; D038524:Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity