Weili Zheng1, Yu-Chung Norman Cheng1, Saifeng Liu2, Helen Nichol3, E. Mark Haacke1
1Radiology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States; 2School of Biomedical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; 3Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Iron is an important endogenous biomarker for many neurological diseases as well as for normal aging. An iron-loaded ferritin phantom was used here to investigate the correlation of iron with susceptibility and the other commonly used iron predictor, R2* (1/T2*). It was found susceptibility mapping predicts iron more reliably than does R2*. Ferritin gelatin phantoms may are a feasible model for human brain iron susceptibility studies. The effect of myelin and chemical exchange may not be negligible when predicting iron using susceptibility mapping and this needs to be further explored in order to accurately predict ferritin iron concentrations in vivo.