Mara Cercignani1, Gareth J. Barker2,
Daniel C. Alexander3
1Neuroimaging Laboratory,
Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy; 2CNS, Department of
Neuroimaging, King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry, London, United
Kingdom; 3Centre for Medical Image computing, Department of
Computer Science, UCL, London, United Kingdom
In this paper the optimal combination of acquisition parameters (including TR, imaging flip angle, amplitude and offset frequency of the saturation pulses) for quantitative magnetization transfer imaging is obtained by means of the set which gives the maximum precision of the estimated MT parameters, under the constraint of fixed total scan time. The optimisation is achieved for a number of sampling points ranging from 10 to 18 using an algorithm of an "evolutionary" type, and the optimised schemes are compared using numerical simulations and in vivo data.