Robert J. Dawe1, David A. Bennett2, Julie A. Schneider2, Konstantinos Arfanakis1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA; 2Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA
Postmortem MRI of the human brain allows for invasive examination of the tissue specimen immediately following the MR scan, a practice that is not possible with living subjects. However, previous investigations have shown that MR properties of the tissue vary with both time and position as fixation progresses, causing misinterpretation of MRI results. In this study, computer simulation was used to model the fixation process in cadaveric brain hemispheres immersed in formaldehyde solution. The resulting changes in the simulated T2 values were shown to be in reasonable agreement with previous experimental observations.
Keywords