Ross William Mair1,2, Thomas Benner2,
Bruce Fischl2,3, Betsy Hemphill1,2, Marisa Hollinshead1,2,
Andre J. W. van Der Kouwe2, Randy L. Buckner1,2
1Center for Brain Science,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; 2Martinos Center
for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States; 3Computer Science &
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, MA, United States
We have implemented an extremely rapid 2-minute multi-echo MPRAGE protocol for anatomical scans in a large human imaging study with thousands of subjects. Using this protocol, we performed a brief multi-site and repeatability trial, including investigation of an upgrade to the system software for the Siemens Tim Trio scanner. The correlation of volumes determined from the rapid multi-echo MPRAGE data acquired at different sites on different days and under different software versions are extremely high, and compare with those obtained previously from standard MPRAGE or multi-echo FLASH, with R2 correlations > 0.95 for most sub-cortical and white matter structures.