Abstract #2389

Ultra-High-Resolution Imaging of the Human Brain at 9.4 T Using K-Space Weighted Acquisition

Juliane Budde¹, Gunamony Shajan¹, Klaus Scheffler¹,², Rolf Pohmann¹

¹Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany; ²Department for Biomedical Magnetic Resonance, University of Tbingen, Tuebingen, Germany

Imaging with high spatial resolutions suffers from low SNR, long durations and high sensitivity to artifacts. K-space weighted imaging by acquiring a varying number of averages depending on the position in k-space constitutes a means to reduce signal contamination from adjacent voxels as well as to increase the apparent SNR. The resulting advantages are evaluated for high resolution human brain imaging at 9.4 T, yielding a gain in SNR of between 15 % and 28 % compared to conventional 3D GRE. With this technique, it was possible to acquire images from the human brain with voxel volumes of 14 nl.