Abstract #0330

In Vivo Characterization of Brain Ultrashort-T2 Components

Tanguy Boucneau^1,2, Shuyu Tang^1,3, Misung Han¹, Roland G Henry^1,4, Duan Xu^1,3, and Peder Eric Zufall Larson^1,3

¹Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California - San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States, ²Physics, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Cachan, France, ³UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States, ⁴Neurology, University of California - San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States

It has recently been shown that myelin contains ultrashort T2 components with sub-millisecond relaxation times that are not observed with conventional pulse sequences and maybe associated with bound protons in the myelin phospholipid membranes.We performed ultrashort T2* relaxometry in vivo to characterize these components with a 3D ultrashort echo time (UTE) pulse sequence at 7T.We observed an ultrashort T2 component (T2* $$$\approx 100 \mu s$$$) as well as a short T2 component (T2* $$$\approx 1.5 ms$$$) that had a distinct frequency shift corresponding to the methylene proton chemical shift, which to our knowledge has never been observed in vivo.These components were validated in an ex vivo post-mortem brain specimen, and may provide valuable new biomarkers of myelin density, structure, and integrity.

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