Olivier M. Girard1,
Virginie Callot2, Alexandre Vignaud3, Gopal Varma4,
Patrick J. Cozzone5, David C. Alsop4, Guillaume Duhamel2
1CRMBM
UMR 7339, CNRS / Aix-Marseille Universit, Marseille, France; 2CRMBM
UMR 7339, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France; 3Siemens Healthcare,
Saint-Denis, France; 4Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and
Harvard Medical School, Boston,, MA, United States; 5CRMBM UMR
7339, Aix-Marseille Universit, Marseille, France
Myelin specific imaging has become an abounding research area because of the high clinical relevance of myelin-associated diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). Recently a novel MT contrast, known as inhomogeneous MT - ihMT, has demonstrated high specificity toward brain WM tissue. In this work an ihMT sequence was developed on a 1.5T clinical scanner and applied on the human cervical spinal cord. This new endogenous contrast demonstrated tremendous specificity towards spinal cord WM. This holds great promise for future clinical applications on SC pathologies such as trauma or MS.
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