Diffusion Imaging of Post-Mortem Human Brains: DW-SSFP at 7T Provides Improved Crossing Fibre Estimates

Sean Foxley¹, Saad Jbabdi¹, Wilfred Lam¹, Karla Miller¹

Post-mortem human brain imaging is of interest both to validate in-vivo measures and to scan for long periods of time to achieve high spatial resolution. Use of diffusion weighted steady-state free precession (DW-SSFP) has been demonstrated to perform significantly better than diffusion-weighted spin echo techniques for post-mortem human brain tractography at 3T. However limitations in SNR have made voxel-by-voxel secondary fibre population estimation difficult. This indicates worse contrast-to-noise ratio than what is currently used for in-vivo protocols. In this work we explore DW-SSFP at 7T with two different b_eff values to investigate potential improvements in secondary fibre estimations.