Susceptibility Mapping of the Substantia Nigra in Parkinson Patients at 7T

Andreas Schfer¹, Derek VM. Ott¹, Almut Focke², Johannes Schwarz², Robert Turner¹, Sonja A. Kotz¹

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in humans. It has been previously demonstrated that transverse relaxation times change in Parkinson patients, supporting pathological findings of increased iron content in the substantia nigra. However, relaxation time is a quite indirect measure of changes in iron concentration, and hard to quantify. Recent studies have used phase images to study neurodegenerative diseases, but this method has the disadvantage that field perturbation maps derived from phase data are non-local. Our study demonstrates that local susceptibility maps, directly indexing iron concentration, can be calculated from phase image data in Parkinson patients.