Amyloid Plaque Detection in a Mouse Model at 17.2 Tesla

Alexandra Petiet¹, ², Luisa Ciobanu², Marc Dhenain³

Amyloid plaques, extracellular deposits of b-amyloid peptides, are early markers of Alzheimers disease. The majority of them in the cortex and hippocampus are poorly loaded with iron, which requires high sensitivity to detect their presence. We used a 17.2-Tesla magnet to achieve an isotropic resolution of 30 um in 7 hours in a mouse model. The image quality achieved revealed many amyloid plaques throughout the brain. Using very high field magnets allows very high resolution imaging in short times and the increased magnetic susceptibility required for amyloid plaque imaging will benefit their detection in live mouse models.