• Negin Yaghmaie, Warda T Syeda, Chengchuan Wu, Yicheng Zhang, Tracy D Zhang, Emma L Burrows, Amy Brodtmann, Bradford A Moffat, David K Wright, Rebecca Glarin, Scott Kolbe, and Leigh A Johnston.
• Melbourne Brain Centre Imaging Unit, The University of Melbourne, Australia; Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia.
• Neuroimage. 2021 May 1; 231: 117701.

PurposeQuantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a novel MR technique that allows mapping of tissue susceptibility values from MR phase images. QSM is an ill-conditioned inverse problem, and although several methods have been proposed in the field, in the presence of a wide range of susceptibility sources, streaking artifacts appear around high susceptibility regions and contaminate the whole QSM map. QSMART is a post-processing pipeline that uses two-stage parallel inversion to reduce the streaking artifacts and remove banding artifact at the cortical surface and around the vasculature.MethodTissue and vein susceptibility values were separately estimated by generating a mask of vasculature driven from the magnitude data using a Frangi filter. Spatially dependent filtering was used for the background field removal step and the two susceptibility estimates were combined in the final QSM map. QSMART was compared to RESHARP/iLSQR and V-SHARP/iLSQR inversion in a numerical phantom, 7T in vivo single and multiple-orientation scans, 9.4T ex vivo mouse data, and 4.7T in vivo rat brain with induced focal ischemia.ResultsSpatially dependent filtering showed better suppression of phase artifacts near cortex compared to RESHARP and V-SHARP, while preserving voxels located within regions of interest without brain edge erosion. QSMART showed successful reduction of streaking artifacts as well as improved contrast between different brain tissues compared to the QSM maps obtained by RESHARP/iLSQR and V-SHARP/iLSQR.ConclusionQSMART can reduce QSM artifacts to enable more robust estimation of susceptibility values in vivo and ex vivo.Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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