Abstract #3178

Improved susceptibility-weighted imaging of the thalamic nuclei at 7T with enhanced contrast and venous vessel exclusion

João Jorge^1,2, Elena Najdenovska^2,3, Constantin Tuleasca^4,5,6, José P. Marques⁷, Marc Levivier^4,6, Philippe Maeder³, Rolf Gruetter^1,3,8, and Meritxell Bach Cuadra^2,3,5

¹Laboratory for Functional and Metabolic Imaging (LIFMET), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, ²Medical Image Analysis Laboratory (MIAL), Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM), Lausanne, Switzerland, ³Department of Radiology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland, ⁴Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Neurosurgery Service and Gamma Knife Center, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), Lausanne, Switzerland, ⁵Signal Processing Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, ⁶Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland, ⁷Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands, ⁸Department of Radiology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

The thalamus plays a key role in neuronal signal transmission and modulation. While most of the current non-invasive imaging techniques fail to achieve substantial contrast between the thalamic nuclei, susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) has recently shown promising capabilities for their visualization at 7T, despite having been originally designed primarily for venous vessel imaging.

The aim of the present work was to optimize the SWI technique specifically for improved thalamic nuclei visualization, by jointly modifying the SWI combination and suppressing venous vessels. These modifications yielded substantially improved contrast and delineation of various thalamic nuclei, in good agreement with histological atlas information.

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