Imaging Multipole Magnetic Susceptibility Anisotropy in vivo

Chunlei Liu¹, Wei Li¹

A method was demonstrated to extract sub-voxel tissue magnetic response in vivo. A set of magnetic multipoles were obtained by analyzing a single volume of gradient-echo images in the spectral space (p-space). An algorithm was developed for multipole analysis of images acquired with multiple coils. A number of unique findings were described: 1) multipole response of white matter exhibits strong dependence on p-value; 2) multipole response of white matter is anisotropic; 3) multipole tensors provide distinctive contrasts and 4) are indicative of tissue microstructure. Most importantly, this unique information can be obtained from a single volume of GRE images.