High Resolution 3D Myelin Water Imaging in Excised Rat Spinal Cord

Piotr Kozlowski¹, Andrew C. Yung¹

Myelin water imaging has been used to characterize rat spinal cord pathology. One of the limitations of the current CPMG based myelin water imaging technique is that it is a single slice technique. It has been shown that a 3D version of this technique can be achieved by applying a second phase encoding gradient to provide localization along the slice direction. In this pilot study we applied the 3D CPMG sequence to acquire very high spatial resolution 3D MWF maps from excised rat spinal cord. The 3D technique produced high quality data that compared favourably with the 2D measurements.