1FMRIB Centre, University of Oxford,
Oxford, United Kingdom; 2Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, King's
College London, London, United Kingdom
The
pathology of myelin in spinal cord disease is poorly understood due to the
technical challenges of measuring myelin noninvasively. Our goal was to
assess the efficacy of multi-component Driven Equilibrium Single Pulse
Observation of T1 and T2 (mcDESPOT) for obtaining high
spatial resolution spinal cord myelin water fraction (MWF) data covering the
entire cervical spinal cord. Our results demonstrated the ability to reliably
acquire high quality MWF data, at a spatial resolution of 1x1x1.5mm over a
12x12x18cm field-of-view, with MWF values consistent with prior literature
values and a coefficient of variation of less than 3%.