Bradley P. Sutton1,2, Anh Tu Van3
1Bioengineering, University of
Illinois, Urbana, IL, United States; 2Beckman Institute,
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, United States; 3Electrical and
Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, United States
Currently
many structural neuroimaging studies rely only on a T1-weighted image for
brain extraction. Additional image contrast like T2 may improve the
performance of the automatic brain extraction procedure. In this work, a
previously proposed multiparametric 3D structural imaging sequence that
provides several volumes with varying contrast in a multi-echo acquisition is
used to assist in automatic brain segmentation. Two 3D volumes (one
T1-weighted and one T2-weighted) with 1.2 mm isotropic resolution and a low
resolution 3D field map were obtained simultaneously within 6.5 minutes.
Improvement in brain extraction utilizing the additional contrast was
observed.