Boris Keil1,
Julien Cohen-Adad1, 2, David A. Porter3,
Stephan Biber3, Keith A. Heberlein4, Christina
Triantafyllou1, Lawrence L. Wald1, 5
1A.A.
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital,
Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Department
of Electrical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada; 3MR R&D, Siemens AG, Healthcare Sector, Erlangen,
Germany; 4Siemens Medical Solution USA, Siemens Healthcare USA,
Charlestown, MA, United States; 5Health Science and Technology,
Harvard-MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States
In this study we evaluated the suitability for simultaneous brain and cervical spinal cord diffusion-weighted MRI acquisition using a custom built array coil utilizing 64 channels. For further mitigation of non-rigid-body motion artifacts, we used a readout-segmented EPI acquisition technique with non-linear 2D navigator phase correction and navigator-based reacquisition. The DW images show well aligned correspondence to structural images with minimal distortions from the c-spinal cord throughout the full brain. The sequence and coil setup were capable of robustly tracking the corticospinal pathway at its full length from the motor cortex down to vertebra T1.