Abstract #0016

Human cerebral white-matter vasculature imaged using the blood-pool contrast agent Ferumoxytol: bundle-specific vessels and vascular density

Michaël Bernier^1,2, Olivia Viessmann^1,2, Ned Ohringer¹, Jingyuan E. Chen^1,2, Nina E. Fultz^1,3, Rebecca Karp Leaf⁴, Lawrence L. Wald^1,2,5, and Jonathan R. Polimeni^1,2,5

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ²Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, United States, ⁴Division of Hematology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ⁵5Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

Ferumoxytol—a safe, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle that amplifies T2* dephasing in blood vessels—can be used as a powerful image contrast enhancement agent to aid vascular imaging. Combining this with an innovative vascular segmentation tool, here we evaluate how Ferumoxytol improves vascular detection throughout the brain using a region-based analysis of the gray-matter and a bundle-specific analysis of the white-matter. We report increases in white-matter vasculature specificity and uncover spatial patterns similar to white-matter tracts, therefore this work sheds new light on the possible existence and influence of a concurrent network of vasculature that follows the known fiber bundles.

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