Abstract #1196

Feasibility of brain pathology assessment with diffusion imaging on a portable scanner using a fixed encoding field

Jason Stockmann^1,2, Patrick McDaniel³, Christopher Vuahgn⁴, Clarissa Z. Cooley^2,4, and Lawrence Wald^4,5

¹A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, ⁴A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, 02129, MA, United States, ⁵Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, United States

Diffusion-weighted MRI is widely used for diagnosing brain pathology, but is typically not available close to the site of acute brain injury due to size, weight, power, and exclusion-zone constraints. Recently-developed lightweight brain scanners have achieved portability by using inhomogeneous B₀ fields and by correcting for field imperfections during image reconstruction. Building on work done by the petroleum industry with single-sided borehole magnets, we use the built-in spatial encoding field of a portable brain scanner for both diffusion-encoding and spatial-encoding. We also introduce a method for using dummy refocusing pulses to vary the b-value without changing TE_eff and T₂-contrast.

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