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Multi‐slice myelin water imaging for practical clinical applications at 3.0 T
Author(s) -
Guo Junyu,
Ji Qing,
Reddick Wilburn E.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
magnetic resonance in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.696
H-Index - 225
eISSN - 1522-2594
pISSN - 0740-3194
DOI - 10.1002/mrm.24527
Subject(s) - myelin , multiple sclerosis , fraction (chemistry) , computer science , white matter , artificial intelligence , pattern recognition (psychology) , magnetic resonance imaging , medicine , radiology , chemistry , central nervous system , chromatography , psychiatry
Myelin water imaging is a promising, noninvasive technique for evaluating white matter diseases such as multiple sclerosis and other leukoencephalopathies (LE), and monitoring myelination in early childhood. Unfortunately, poor image quality and a long acquisition time are major obstacles to practical clinical applications. In this study, a novel postprocessing method with an efficient multi‐slice acquisition scheme, called T 2 spectrum analysis using a weighted regularized non‐negative least squares algorithm and nonlocal mean filter ( T 2 SPARC), is presented to overcome these obstacles and achieve a shorter acquisition time, higher image quality, and large volume coverage. In vivo results from healthy volunteers and a patient with LE showed that the T 2 SPARC method can generate robust and high‐quality myelin water fraction maps of 10 slices within 11 min. This method also yields some useful byproducts such as intra‐ and extracellular water fraction and long T 2 tissue water fraction maps, which can quantify lesions in different brain diseases. Magn Reson Med 70:813–822, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.