Anatomical, BOLD, Blood Flow MRI of Non-Human Primate (Baboon) Retina

Yi Zhang^1,2, Hsiao-Ying Wey^1,2, Oscar San Emeterio Nateras², Qi Peng^1,2, Timothy Q. Duong^1,2

In rodent models, layer-specific resolution of anatomical, blood flow and functional MRI has been reported. As a first step toward translation, we investigated the feasibility of multimodal retinal MRI on anesthetized large non-human primate (baboon) using a standard clinical 3-Tesla scanner. Baboon was chosen because it has large eyes and better recapitulates human retinal diseases. Anesthesia and paralysis were used to exclude movement artifacts, such that we could focus on evaluating hardware feasibility and pulse sequence parameters for high-resolution multimodal MRI of the retina on a clinical scanner. These findings offer encouraging data to explore human applications.