A Quantitative Comparison of PSIR and MP-RAGE at 7T Using Tissue Classification

Alain Pitiot¹, Olivier E. Mougin², Penelope A. Gowland²

Phase Sensitive Inversion Recovery (PSIR) is showing great potential in neuroimaging owing to the increased contrast it provides with respect to other T1 weighted approaches, such as standard MP-RAGE. While this offers intuitive advantages, the relative merits of MP-RAGE and PSIR have not been assessed systematically to date. In this study, we use brain tissue classification as a realistic framework to quantitatively compare the performances of both sequences. Results suggest that the enhanced contrast afforded by PSIR translates into better defined maps, less susceptible to B1 inhomogeneities and changes in myelin content.