Cortical Layers Imaging with Inversion Recovery MRI

Daniel Barazany¹, Ory Levy¹, Yaniv Assaf¹

Cyto-architecture is a histological features that delineate the neuronal morphology of the tissue in general and layers in cortex in particular. Currently there is no in-vivo imaging modality that enables accurate and robust visualization of neuronal cell structures. In this work we use a multi-parametric MRI and clustering approach to segment the cortex into a laminar pattern based on multi-spectral inversion recovery dataset. This approach was implemented on the rat brain and compared with cyto-architectonic analysis; there is a good agreement between the MRI layers and histological identification of the layers. Similar results were also obtained on the human brain.