Abstract #0153

Quantitative susceptibility mapping in UK Biobank brain imaging: pipeline and preliminary results in 2400 subjects

Chaoyue Wang¹, Stephen M. Smith¹, Fidel Alfaro-Almagro¹, Cristiana Fiscone², Richard Bowtell², Lloyd T. Elliott³, Karla L. Miller¹, and Benjamin C. Tendler¹

¹Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, FMRIB, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ²Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom, ³Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

UK Biobank aims to scan 100,000 participants and its brain protocol acquires susceptibility-weighted MRI (swMRI). To date, only the swMRI magnitude data were processed to produce T2* maps. The aim of this work is to develop a robust processing pipeline for QSM using the acquired swMRI phase data. We ran this pipeline on 2408 volunteers and report some preliminary results, including age-dependent curves and genetic associations. Significant correlations were found between susceptibility and age in subcortical structures. QSM discovered replicable genetic associations previously identified in T2*. Our results suggest that there is unique information in susceptibility maps compared to T2*.

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