High-resolution myelin-water fraction and quantitative relaxation mapping using 3D ViSTa-MR fingerprinting

Congyu Liao; Xiaozhi Cao; Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer; Sophie Schauman; Zihan Zhou; Xiaoqian Yan; Quan Chen; Zhitao Li; Nan Wang; Ting Gong; Zhe Wu; Hongjian He; Jianhui Zhong; Yang Yang; Adam Kerr; Kalanit Grill-Spector; Kawin Setsompop

High-resolution myelin-water fraction and quantitative relaxation mapping using 3D ViSTa-MR fingerprinting

ArXiv [Preprint]. 2023 Dec 21:arXiv:2312.13523v1.

Authors

Congyu Liao^{1

2}, Xiaozhi Cao^{1

2}, Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer^{1

3}, Sophie Schauman^{1

2}, Zihan Zhou^{1

4}, Xiaoqian Yan^{5

6}, Quan Chen^{1

2}, Zhitao Li¹, Nan Wang^{1

2}, Ting Gong⁷, Zhe Wu⁸, Hongjian He^{4

9}, Jianhui Zhong^{4

10}, Yang Yang¹¹, Adam Kerr^{2

12}, Kalanit Grill-Spector⁵, Kawin Setsompop^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
² Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
³ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁴ Center for Brain Imaging Science and Technology, College of Biomedical Engineering & Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
⁵ Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
⁶ Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
⁷ Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA.
⁸ Techna Institute, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.
⁹ School of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
¹⁰ Department of Imaging Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA.
¹¹ Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
¹² Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

PMID: 38196746
PMCID: PMC10775347

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to develop a high-resolution whole-brain multi-parametric quantitative MRI approach for simultaneous mapping of myelin-water fraction (MWF), T₁, T₂, and proton-density (PD), all within a clinically feasible scan time.

Methods: We developed 3D ViSTa-MRF, which combined Visualization of Short Transverse relaxation time component (ViSTa) technique with MR Fingerprinting (MRF), to achieve high-fidelity whole-brain MWF and T₁/T₂/PD mapping on a clinical 3T scanner. To achieve fast acquisition and memory-efficient reconstruction, the ViSTa-MRF sequence leverages an optimized 3D tiny-golden-angle-shuffling spiral-projection acquisition and joint spatial-temporal subspace reconstruction with optimized preconditioning algorithm. With the proposed ViSTa-MRF approach, high-fidelity direct MWF mapping was achieved without a need for multi-compartment fitting that could introduce bias and/or noise from additional assumptions or priors.

Results: The in-vivo results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed acquisition and reconstruction framework to provide fast multi-parametric mapping with high SNR and good quality. The in-vivo results of 1mm- and 0.66mm-iso datasets indicate that the MWF values measured by the proposed method are consistent with standard ViSTa results that are 30x slower with lower SNR. Furthermore, we applied the proposed method to enable 5-minute whole-brain 1mm-iso assessment of MWF and T₁/T₂/PD mappings for infant brain development and for post-mortem brain samples.

Conclusions: In this work, we have developed a 3D ViSTa-MRF technique that enables the acquisition of whole-brain MWF, quantitative T₁, T₂, and PD maps at 1mm and 0.66mm isotropic resolution in 5 and 15 minutes, respectively. This advancement allows for quantitative investigations of myelination changes in the brain.

Keywords: high resolution; myelin-water fraction; quantitative MRI.

Publication types

Preprint

Abstract

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