Slower Transverse Relaxation in the Dominant Hemisphere

Jianli Wang¹, James R. Connor², Qing X. Yang^1,2

Most of time, our two cerebral hemispheres have different functions and usually one side dominates over the other on some specific functions. It is not clear whether there is any difference in the brain tissue relaxation time between the two hemispheres. The characterization of hemispheric symmetry of transverse relaxation rate, R2 (1/T2), in a specific anatomic structure in the normal human brain is important baseline information for clinical applications of T2-weighted imaging and quantitative parametric mapping. In this abstract, we report the hemispheric difference of T2 relaxation in a large normal human brain cohort at 3.0 T.