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Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping: Contrast Mechanisms and Clinical Applications.
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a recently developed MRI technique for quantifying the spatial distribution of magnetic susceptibility within biological tissues. It first uses the frequency shift in the MRI signal to map the magnetic field profile within the tissue. The resulting field map is then used to determine the spatial distribution of the underlying magnetic susceptibility by solving an inverse problem. The solution is achieved by deconvolving the field map with a dipole field, under the assumption that the magnetic field is a result of the superposition of the dipole fields generated by all voxels and that each voxel has its unique magnetic susceptibility. QSM provides improved contrast to noise ratio for certain tissues and structures compared to its magnitude counterpart. More importantly, magnetic susceptibility is a direct reflection of the molecular composition and cellular architecture of the tissue. Consequently, by quantifying magnetic susceptibility, QSM is becoming a quantitative imaging approach for characterizing normal and pathological tissue properties. This article reviews the mechanism generating susceptibility contrast within tissues and some associated applications
Learning-based Single-step Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping Reconstruction Without Brain Extraction
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) estimates the underlying tissue
magnetic susceptibility from MRI gradient-echo phase signal and typically
requires several processing steps. These steps involve phase unwrapping, brain
volume extraction, background phase removal and solving an ill-posed inverse
problem. The resulting susceptibility map is known to suffer from inaccuracy
near the edges of the brain tissues, in part due to imperfect brain extraction,
edge erosion of the brain tissue and the lack of phase measurement outside the
brain. This inaccuracy has thus hindered the application of QSM for measuring
the susceptibility of tissues near the brain edges, e.g., quantifying cortical
layers and generating superficial venography. To address these challenges, we
propose a learning-based QSM reconstruction method that directly estimates the
magnetic susceptibility from total phase images without the need for brain
extraction and background phase removal, referred to as autoQSM. The neural
network has a modified U-net structure and is trained using QSM maps computed
by a two-step QSM method. 209 healthy subjects with ages ranging from 11 to 82
years were employed for patch-wise network training. The network was validated
on data dissimilar to the training data, e.g. in vivo mouse brain data and
brains with lesions, which suggests that the network has generalized and
learned the underlying mathematical relationship between magnetic field
perturbation and magnetic susceptibility. AutoQSM was able to recover magnetic
susceptibility of anatomical structures near the edges of the brain including
the veins covering the cortical surface, spinal cord and nerve tracts near the
mouse brain boundaries. The advantages of high-quality maps, no need for brain
volume extraction and high reconstruction speed demonstrate its potential for
future applications.Comment: 26 page
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