2D Multi-Slice Quantitative Myelin Water Imaging at 3T

Junyu Guo¹, Qing Ji¹, Wilburn E. Reddick¹

Myelin water fraction (MWF) provides a direct indicator of myelin structure and component change due to white matter diseases. Conventionally, the data acquisition time for generating a MWF map of a single slice takes about 25 minutes. In this study, we proposed a 2D multi-slice acquisition scheme with much higher efficiency and capturing the small contribution of the myelin-water signal. This acquisition scheme could cover most of the brain volume in less than 12 minutes. We also provided a weighted regularized nonnegative least squares (wrNNLS) algorithm to generate reliable parametric maps.