Abstract #3843

Diffusion-Guided Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping

Amanda C. L. Ng¹,², David K. Wright³,⁴, Parnesh Raniga,²⁵, Stephen Moore⁶, Gary F. Egan², Leigh A. Johnston,⁴⁷

¹Dept of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ²Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ³Centre for Neuroscience, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ⁴Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, The University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ⁵The Australian e-Health Research Centre-BioMedIA The Australian e-Health Research Centre-BioMedIA, CSIRO Preventative Health National Research Flagship ICTC, Herston, QLD, Australia; ⁶IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences-Melbourne, Victorian Life Sciences Computing Initiative, The University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ⁷NeuroEngineering Laboratory, Dept. Electrical & Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) aims to derive reliable estimates of the magnetic susceptibility of voxels from phase data arising from 3D gradient-echo MRI acquisitions. Current methods compute the contribution of all tissue types using a spherical model, however research has shown that white matter is better modelled as cylinders. We present a method for deriving susceptibility maps from MRI phase data that combines both spherical and cylindrical models. We use MR diffusion data to identify voxels best modelled as cylinders and to determine the orientation of those cylinders. Our results demonstrated improved accuracy and robustness compared to conventional methods.