High-Resolution Diffusion Imaging of the In Vivo Human Hippocampus

Michael Zeineh¹, Samantha Holdsworth¹, Stefan Skare¹, Scott Atlas¹, Roland Bammer¹

For clinical entities such as Alzheimers disease and epilepsy, it would be beneficial to perform diffusion imaging of the medial temporal lobes with higher resolution than typically acquired for a more detailed analysis of hippocampal microstructure. In this study, we have compared 8-channel and 32-channel coil acquisitions at 3T while altering the direction of phase encoding and use of GRAPPA-accelerated echo-planar imaging. We demonstrate that an optimal balance of SNR, distortion, and symmetry is achieved using the 32-channel coil utilizing parallel imaging with phase-encoding in the supero-inferior direction.