Riddhi Rajgor1, Nils Muhlert2, Antoine Lutti3, Matteo Atzori4, 5, Nikolaus Weiskopf3, Claudia AM Wheeler-Kingshott2, Xavier Golay1, Alan J. Thompson4, Olga Ciccarelli4, David L. Thomas1
1Department of Brain Repair and Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom; 2NMR Research Unit, Department of Neuroinflammation, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom; 3Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom; 4NMR Research Unit, Department of Brain Repair and Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom; 5Department of Neurology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
DIR brain imaging is widely applied to patients with multiple sclerosis, to suppress the signals from white matter and CSF and facilitate the visualisation of lesions. However, DIR is an inherently inefficient technique, since long inversion and repetition times are required to allow the desired contrast to evolve. The aim of this work was to investigate the potential of using FLASH-based multi-parameter mapping to generate synthetic DIR images with equivalent image SNR and contrast. It was found that synthetic DIR images suppress unwanted tissue signals well, but do not demonstrate grey matter lesions as clearly as acquired DIR images.