• Luke Xie, Russell Dibb, Gary P Cofer, Wei Li, Peter J Nicholls, G Allan Johnson, and Chunlei Liu.
• Center for In Vivo Microscopy, Department of Radiology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA.
• Magn Reson Med. 2015 Mar 1; 73 (3): 1270-81.

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to determine whether susceptibility tensor imaging (STI) could overcome limitations of current techniques to detect tubules throughout the kidney.MethodsNormal mouse kidneys (n = 4) were imaged at 9.4T using a three-dimensional gradient multi-echo sequence (55-micron isotropic resolution). Phase images from 12 orientations were obtained to compute the susceptibility tensor. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) with 12 encoding directions was compared with STI. Tractography was performed to visualize and track the course of tubules with DTI and STI. Confocal microscopy was used to identify which tubular segments of the nephron were detected by DTI and STI.ResultsDiffusion anisotropy was limited to the inner medulla of the kidney. DTI did not find a significant number of coherent tubular tracks in the outer medulla or cortex. With STI, we found strong susceptibility anisotropy and many tracks in the inner and outer medulla and in limited areas of the cortex.ConclusionSTI was able to track tubules throughout the kidney, whereas DTI was limited to the inner medulla. STI provides a novel contrast mechanism related to local tubule microstructure and may offer a powerful method to study the nephron.© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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