Magnetic resonance in medicine : official journal of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
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Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) is a commonly used animal model that in several respects mimics human multiple sclerosis (MS), and can be used to design or validate new strategies for treatment of this disease. In the present study, different MRI techniques (macrophage tracking based on labeling cells in vivo by ultrasmall particles of iron oxide (USPIO), blood-brain barrier (BBB) breakdown, and magnetization transfer imaging (MTI)), as well as immunohistological staining were used to study the burden of disease in Lewis rats immunized by guinea pig myelin. The resulting imaging data was compared with behavioral readouts. ⋯ These areas coincided in part with areas of BBB breakdown. Significant changes of the magnetization transfer ratios (MTRs) of up to 35% were observed in areas of USPIO accumulation. This suggests that infiltrating monocytes are the major source of demyelination in EAE, but monocyte infiltration and breakdown of the BBB are temporally or spatially independent inflammatory processes.
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Echo-planar spectroscopic imaging (EPSI) can be used for fast spectroscopic imaging of water and fat resonances at high resolution to improve structural and functional imaging. Because of the use of oscillating gradients during the free induction decay (FID), spectra obtained with EPSI are often degraded by Nyquist ghost artifacts arising from the inconsistency between the odd and even echoes. The presence of the spectral ghost lines causes errors in the evaluation of the true spectral lines, and this degrades images derived from high-resolution EPSI data. ⋯ This technique is demonstrated with EPSI data acquired from human brains and breasts at 1.5 Tesla and from a water phantom at 4.7 Tesla. Experimental results indicate that the present approach significantly reduces the intensities of spectral ghosts. This technique is most useful in conjunction with high-resolution EPSI of water and fat resonances, but is less applicable to EPSI of metabolites due to the complexity of the spectra.
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The BOLD signal consists of an intravascular (IV) and an extravascular (EV) component from both small and large vessels. Their relative contributions are dependent on field strength, imaging technique, and echo time. The IV and EV contributions were investigated in the human visual cortex at 4 and 7 T using spin-echo and gradient-echo BOLD fMRI with and without suppression of blood effects. ⋯ However, at echo times (55-65 ms) approximating tissue T(2) typically used for optimal BOLD contrast, these gradients had much smaller effects at both fields, consistent with the decreasing blood T(2) with increasing field strength. Gradient-echo BOLD percent changes, with relatively long echo times at both fields, were virtually unaffected by gradients that attenuated the blood contribution because the EV BOLD surrounding both large and small vessels dominated. These results suggest that spin-echo BOLD fMRI at 4 and 7 T, with TE approximating tissue T(2), significantly reduces nonspecific mapping signals from large vessels and significantly accentuates microvasculature contributions.
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The Hahn spin-echo (HSE)-based BOLD effect at high magnetic fields is expected to provide functional images that originate exclusively from the microvasculature. The blood contribution that dominates HSE BOLD contrast at low magnetic fields (e.g., 1.5 T), and degrades specificity, is highly attenuated at high fields because the apparent T(2) of venous blood in an HSE experiment decreases quadratically with increasing magnetic field. In contrast, the HSE BOLD contrast is believed to arise from the microvasculature and increase supralinearly with the magnetic field strength. ⋯ The HSE signal changes at 7 T were modeled accurately using a vascular volume of 1.5%, in agreement with the capillary volume of gray matter. Furthermore, high-resolution acquisitions indicate that CNR increased with voxel sizes < 1 mm(3) due to diminishing white matter or cerebrospinal fluid-space vs. gray matter PVEs. It was concluded that the high-field HSE functional MRI (fMRI) signals originated largely from the capillaries, and that the magnitude of the signal changes associated with brain function reached sufficiently high levels at 7 T to make it a useful approach for mapping on the millimeter to submillimeter spatial scale.
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Resolution in (1)H lung imaging is limited mainly by the acquisition time. Today, half-Fourier acquisition single-shot turbo spin-echo (HASTE) sequences, with short echo time (TE) and short interecho spacing (T(inter)) have found increased use in lung imaging. ⋯ Compared to conventional imaging methods, substantially increased resolution is obtained using the PPA approach. Representative in vivo (1)H lung images acquired with a HASTE sequence in combination with the generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisition (GRAPPA) method, up to an acceleration factor of three, are presented.