The challenge of conducting diffusion tensor imaging in the presence of systemic contrast agent has been noted clinically. Here, we investigate primed infusion as a means of stabilizing contrast enhancement in the mouse brain during image acquisition. Our results show that with infusion-sustained contrast enhancement, fractional anisotropy (FA) was significantly elevated in whole brain and corpus callosum ROIs, but not in hippocampus ROI. Contrast enhancement significantly increased tractography metric of relative mean fiber-track length in corpus callosum versus hippocampus. Thus, contrast enhancement may have a preferential effect on anisotropic brain regions and could potentially be applied to amplify FA selectively.
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