Chris David James Sinclair1,2, Rebecca S.
Samson3, David L. Thomas4, Nikolaus Weiskopf5,
Antoine Lutti5, John S. Thornton1,6, Xavier Golay,
2,6
1MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases,
UCL Institute of Neurology, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom; 2Department
of Brain Repair and Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, London WC1N
3BG, United Kingdom; 3Department of Neuroinflammation, UCL
Institute of Neurology, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom; 4Advanced
MRI Group, UCL Medical Physics, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom; 5Wellcome
Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL Institute of Neurology, London WC1N 3BG,
United Kingdom; 6National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery,
London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom
We
applied a quantitative magnetization transfer model to healthy human muscle
data in vivo to pave the way to its implementation in patients with
neuromuscular diseases. The right lower leg of 10 subjects was imaged at 3T
with an MT-prepared sequence with variable offset frequencies and amplitudes
and accompanying T1 and B1 maps. A 2-pool MT model accounting for pulsed
saturation was fitted to the data to obtain qMT parameters for normal muscle
such as T2 of the restricted proton pool and the restricted pool fraction f,
measured to be around 8%.