Abstract #0361

Liu W, Schaeffter T, Frank J, Dahnke H

Contrast agents based on super paramagnetic iron oxides SPIOs are widely used for cell labeling. The cell detection is hampered by the negative contrast the SPIOs introduce in conventional imaging. We propose a method to calculate an optimal positive contrast image by determining a map of the susceptibility gradients from a regular 3D image dataset. This avoids the use of dedicated positive contrast sequences and does not require prior knowledge about the local SPIO concentration; in addition to that, the map of the susceptibility gradients contains quantitative information that could be used for SPIO quantification.