Title :
High-resolution quantitative imaging of the substantia nigra
Author :
Paula Trujillo;Alex K. Smith;Paul E. Summers;Luca M. Mainardi;Sergio Cerutti;Seth A. Smith;Antonella Costa
Author_Institution :
Department of Neuroradiology, Fondazione IRCCS Ca´ Granda - Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan, Italy
Abstract :
There is a growing interest in identifying neuroimaging-based biomarkers for Parkinson´s disease (PD), a progressive neurodegenerative disorder in which the major pathologic substrate is the loss of pigmented dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra (SN). Recently, an MRI technique dubbed “neuromelanin-sensitive MRI” (NM-MRI), has been found to provide notable contrast between the SN and surrounding brain tissues with potential applications as biomarker of PD. The contrast in NM-MRI has been associated with magnetization transfer (MT) effects, and thus the goal of this study was to characterize the impact of MT on NM-MRI, and to demonstrate the feasibility of performing quantitative MT (qMT) imaging in human SN. The results of this study demonstrate that high-resolution rapid qMT imaging of the SN can be reliably obtained within reasonable scan times, thereby can be translatable into clinical practice.
Keywords :
"Tin","Magnetic resonance imaging","Diseases","Magnetization","Biomarkers","Protons"
Conference_Titel :
Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE
Electronic_ISBN :
1558-4615
DOI :
10.1109/EMBC.2015.7319619