Masaki Fukunaga1, Jongho Lee1, Tie-Qiang Li, Kant K. Matsuda2, Hellmut Merkle, Peter van Gelderen1, Jacco A. de Zwart1, Jeff H. Duyn1
1Advanced MRI/LFMI/NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA; 2Laboratory of Pathology/NCI, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
High resolution T2* weighted MRI at high field strength shows substantial contrast variation across laminae in cortical gray matter. This contrast variation also exist within cortical gray matter and subcortical white matter. In this work, to assess the contribution of non-heme iron and myelin in the R2* variations, we investigated the similarity of R2* map and histochemical stained image of the human brain. The contrast variation of R2* map highly corresponded to iron stain than myelin stain, it demonstrates that possible main contributor of R2* variation is non-heme iron.