Sarah Eskreis-Winkler1, 2, Tian Liu3, Weiwei Chen4, Michael Kaplitt1, A. John Tsiouris1, Yi Wang1
1Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, United States; 2New York Hospital Queens, Flushing, NY, United States; 3MedImageMetric LLC; 4Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Neurosurgeons performing deep brain stimulation on Parkinsons disease patients must pintpoint the precise location of the subthalamic nucleus -- however this is often difficult to do on T2* and T2 weighted imaging. Here we evaluate the ability of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), a recently developed MR imaging technique, to better locate the STN than T2*W and T2W imaging. We find that QSM provides a better contrast-to-noise ratio (a 6-fold improvement over T2*W, and an 8-fold improvement over T2W) for depicting the STN than conventional MR imaging.