Abstract #2506

Specific Inhomogeneous MT Contrast in White Matter. Application to Spinal Cord Imaging.

Olivier M. Girard¹, Virginie Callot², Alexandre Vignaud³, Gopal Varma⁴, Patrick J. Cozzone⁵, David C. Alsop⁴, Guillaume Duhamel²

¹CRMBM UMR 7339, CNRS / Aix-Marseille Universit, Marseille, France; ²CRMBM UMR 7339, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France; ³Siemens Healthcare, Saint-Denis, France; ⁴Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston,, MA, United States; ⁵CRMBM UMR 7339, Aix-Marseille Universit, Marseille, France

Myelin specific imaging has become an abounding research area because of the high clinical relevance of myelin-associated diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). Recently a novel MT contrast, known as inhomogeneous MT - ihMT, has demonstrated high specificity toward brain WM tissue. In this work an ihMT sequence was developed on a 1.5T clinical scanner and applied on the human cervical spinal cord. This new endogenous contrast demonstrated tremendous specificity towards spinal cord WM. This holds great promise for future clinical applications on SC pathologies such as trauma or MS.