RESEARCH ARTICLE
Separation of Fiber Tracts within the Human Cingulum Bundle using Single-Shot STEAM DTI
Alexander Karaus*, Sabine Hofer, Jens Frahm
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 21
Last Page: 27
Publisher Id: TOMIJ-3-21
Article History:
Received Date: 7/7/2009Revision Received Date: 30/7/2009
Acceptance Date: 25/8/2009
Electronic publication date: 11/12/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The cingulum bundle is a complex white matter fiber tract of the human brain that comprises long association fibers, commissural fibers, and various U-fibers. It is located above the corpus callosum and interconnects limbic structures. A decline of the cingulum fiber integrity has been observed in patients with mental disorders such as schizophrenia. In this work a separation of the bi-hemispheric lateral longitudinal striae and selected U-fibers was achieved by fiber tractography of the cingulum bundle based on diffusion tensor imaging at 1.8 mm isotropic spatial resolution. Anatomic accuracy without susceptibility-induced distortions was ensured by diffusion-weighted single-shot STEAM MRI with 24 gradient directions and b values of 0 and 1000 s mm-2. Extending earlier versions, the STEAM sequence combined variable flip angles, centrically reordered phase encoding, partial Fourier encoding, and parallel imaging.
