Anna Izabella Blazejewska1, Samuel Wharton1,
Alain Pitoit2, Ashley Kempf1, Stefan Schwarz3,
James Lowe4, Dorothee P. Auer3, Richard Bowtell1,
Penny A. Gowland1
1Sir Peter Mansfield
Magnetic Resonance Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United
Kingdom; 2School of Psychology, University of Nottingham; 3Division
of Academic Radiology, University of Nottingham; 4Division of
Pathology, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
The relationship between the appearance of substantia nigra (SN) on histology anatomy and MRI remains unclear. We show that high-resolution MR images acquired both post mortem and in vivo, may allow the identification of nigrosome-like structures in the SN pars compacta, which have not previously been reported in MR data, but which have been found in a histology study using immunostaining. We also prove that susceptibility maps correlate with the Perl's stain histology and can be used to identify the iron rich SN as well as to examine the levels of iron content in different parts of the SN.