Abstract #0537

Prospects for improving neuronal specificity of fMRI with Ferumoxytol: an evaluation of vascular segmentation and cortical depth-dependent analysis

Michaël Bernier^1,2, Jingyuan E. Chen^1,2, Ned Ohringer¹, Nina E. Fultz¹, Rebecca Karp Leaf³, Olivia Viessmann^1,2, Laura D. Lewis^1,2, Lawrence L. Wald^1,2,4, and Jonathan R. Polimeni^1,2,4

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, MA, United States, ²Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³Division of Hematology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ⁴Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, MA, United States

Ferumoxytol, a superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle, is commonly used as an intravenous treatment for anemia, but has been recently employed as a blood-pool contrast agent for MRI. Here we evaluated Ferumoxytol as a tool to improve the neuronal specificity of fMRI using it for both improved vascular segmentation and for CBV-weighted functional contrast. We employed multi-echo gradient recalled echo (ME-GRE) acquisitions with functional imaging pre and post injection, performed vascular extraction/segmentation, and report apparent quantitative CBV changes surrounding vessels as a function of echo-time. This work demonstrates the possibility of high-resolution CBV mapping, gray- and white-matter angiography, and cortical depth-dependent analyses with this contrast agent.

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