Meeting Banner
Abstract #3931

High-Resolution Diffusion Imaging of the In Vivo Human Hippocampus

Michael Zeineh1, Samantha Holdsworth1, Stefan Skare1, Scott Atlas1, Roland Bammer1

1Stanford Univeristy, Stanford, CA, United States


For clinical entities such as Alzheimers disease and epilepsy, it would be beneficial to perform diffusion imaging of the medial temporal lobes with higher resolution than typically acquired for a more detailed analysis of hippocampal microstructure. In this study, we have compared 8-channel and 32-channel coil acquisitions at 3T while altering the direction of phase encoding and use of GRAPPA-accelerated echo-planar imaging. We demonstrate that an optimal balance of SNR, distortion, and symmetry is achieved using the 32-channel coil utilizing parallel imaging with phase-encoding in the supero-inferior direction.