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Abstract #4002

7T Diffusion Imaging of Rat by Using SNAILS and Its Application in Stroke Study

Jian Zhang1,2, Joshua Chua3, Chunlei Liu4, Shangping Feng1, Michael Moseley2

1Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 2Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 3Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 4Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, United States


Animal stroke studies with DWI are widely investigated to facilitate the development of stroke diagnosis. However, diffusion imaging on small animals at high fields is usually very challenging due to the resolution-SNR tradeoff and hardware imperfection. The widely used single shot EPI DWI technique is particularly vulnerable to these factors and tends to produce severe image artifacts. In this work, we demonstrate the implementation of the self-navigated interleaved spirals (SNAILS) technique on our 7T animal scanner. High quality DWI images can be acquired for stroke studies on rats. The preliminary diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) results are also presented.

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