Christopher David James Sinclair1,2, Jasper
M. Morrow1, Michael G. Hanna1, Mary M. Reilly1,
Tarek A. Yousry1,2, Xavier Golay2, John S. Thornton1,2
1MRC Centre for Neuromuscular
Diseases, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom; 2Department
of Brain Repair & Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, London,
United Kingdom
We evaluate a scheme for correcting RF inhomogeneities in skeletal muscle magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) maps using B1 mapping data. A quantitative model of pulsed MT is used to demonstrate the applicability of the scheme to muscle and we perform automatic segmentation using T1 maps. We demonstrate experimentally that the correction scheme reduces the within- and between- subject variation of muscle MTR measures in 28 healthy volunteers and 23 patients with neuromuscular conditions. Reductions in instrumental inhomogeneities improve the potential of MTR as quantitative marker of disease, which has been shown previously to correlate with clinical disease status.
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