Abstract #2006

Ullmann P, Junge S, Wick M, Hennel F, Breuer F, Jakob P, Ruhm W, Khler S

This study demonstrates that MRI in small animals at high fields can greatly benefit from using Parallel Imaging (PI) and that this technique has the potential to gain a similar importance in such applications as in routine clinical MRI. For 3D time-of-flight angiography of the rat and mouse brain it is shown that a PI acceleration factor of two yields almost the same image quality as the corresponding non-accelerated experiment. Using PI in DTI experiments allows to acquire significantly more diffusion directions in the same acquisition time which results in a considerably improved image quality of the derived anisotropy maps. The value of this additionally acquired information about diffusion anisotropy is demonstrated by a DTI study on a formalin-fixed rat brain.