Abstract #1086

Laminar-Specific Variations of T2* Relaxation Decay in the Cortex at 7 Tesla MRI

Sindhuja Tirumalai Govindarajan¹, Julien Cohen-Adad¹, Audrey Fan², Maria Pia Sormani³, Caterina Mainero¹

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, United States; ²Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States; ³Department of Health Sciences, University of Genoa, Genova, Liguria, Italy

Gradient Echo T2* data acquired at ultra-high field magnetic resonance (≥7 T) have shown great sensitivity to detect patterns of tissue microarchitecture in the cortex. We recently demonstrated a surface-based technique to map quantitative measures of T2* relaxation decay to study the spatial distribution of cortical myelination. In this study, we report layer-specific variations and reproducibility of T2* observed at different cortical depths shedding light into the potential use of quantitative T2* mapping to characterize the laminar architecture of the cortical ribbon in vivo.