Abstract #1210

Simultaneous Diffusion-Weighted MRI of Brain and Cervical Spinal Cord Using a 64-Channel Head-Neck Array Coil at 3T

Boris Keil¹, Julien Cohen-Adad¹,², David A. Porter³, Stephan Biber³, Keith A. Heberlein⁴, Christina Triantafyllou¹, Lawrence L. Wald¹,⁵

¹A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; ²Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; ³MR R&D, Siemens AG, Healthcare Sector, Erlangen, Germany; ⁴Siemens Medical Solution USA, Siemens Healthcare USA, Charlestown, MA, United States; ⁵Health Science and Technology, Harvard-MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States

In this study we evaluated the suitability for simultaneous brain and cervical spinal cord diffusion-weighted MRI acquisition using a custom built array coil utilizing 64 channels. For further mitigation of non-rigid-body motion artifacts, we used a readout-segmented EPI acquisition technique with non-linear 2D navigator phase correction and navigator-based reacquisition. The DW images show well aligned correspondence to structural images with minimal distortions from the c-spinal cord throughout the full brain. The sequence and coil setup were capable of robustly tracking the corticospinal pathway at its full length from the motor cortex down to vertebra T1.