Eve LoCastro1,
Sneha N. Pandya1, Xiobo Shen2, Thanh Nguyen, PhD1,
Susan A. Gauthier3, Ashish Raj1
1Department
of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, United States; 2Department
of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States; 3Department
of Neurology and Neuroscience, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY,
United States
To introduce a new software pipeline for performing clinically feasible and routine quantitative myelin imaging via T2 Relaxometry, with specific application to demyelinating diseases like Multiple Sclerosis. T2 Relaxometry uses multi-echo T2weighted images to separate the contribution of various tissue components in the brain, thereby quantifying the myelin content. We have developed a fully automated pipeline in MATLAB featuring 3 steps: a) fast 3D T2-prepared spiral MR sequence for rapid multi-echo T2 imaging, b) a new post-processing technique obtaining T2 distributions and myelin fractions, and c) fully automated atlas-based coregistration, segmentation and parcellation pipeline to enable cross-subject voxel-based analysis. The overall pipeline is depicted in Fig 1. This analysis pipeline will be made publically available to facilitate routine myelin imaging and statistical analysis in common space.