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Abstract #0131

Who Said Fat is Bad? Skull-Stripping Benefits from Additional Fat Image.

Delphine Ribes1,2, Tobias Kober1,2, Giulio Gambarota3, Reto Meuli4, Gunnar Krueger2

1Laboratory for Functional & Metabolic Imaging, Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; 2Advanced Clinical Imaging Technology, Siemens Suisse SA - CIBM, Lausanne, Switzerland; 3Clinical Imaging Center, GSK, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom; 4Department of Radiology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland


Being a preliminary step for many clinical applications and analyses, accurate skull-stripping is a key challenge in MR brain imaging. One of its major difficulties arises from the contrast similarities at brain/non-brain tissue interfaces. Multispectral imaging may help to mitigate this problem. Specifically, the acquisition of multiple echoes in a MP-RAGE sequence as shown in the work of van der Kouwe et al. (2008) can be used for this purpose. We combine their approach with the classical Dixon method to obtain an additional contrast depicting only the fat signal. This work investigates whether the thus generated additional information can improve the outcome of an unsupervised intensity-based skull-stripping algorithm.