RESEARCH ARTICLE


Quantitative Diffusion Tensor Imaging of White Matter Microstructure in Dog Brain at 7T



Ping Wang*, 1, Jian-Ming Zhu2
1 Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
2 Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2010
Volume: 4
First Page: 1
Last Page: 5
Publisher Id: TOMIJ-4-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874347101004010001

Article History:

Received Date: 13/10/2009
Revision Received Date: 27/01/2010
Acceptance Date: 04/02/2010
Electronic publication date: 16/7/2010
Collection year: 2010

© 2010 Wang and Zhu;

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.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; Tel: 215-349-5356; Fax: 215-662-7106; E-mail: ping.wang@uphs.upenn.edu


Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a noninvasive quantitative imaging scheme to assess the functional microanatomy of dog brain using high resolution diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) at 7-Tesla (T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Diffusion weighted images (DWIs) along 25 diffusion-encoding directions, combined with T2 weighted images, were acquired using the standard spin-echo diffusion encoding scheme to determine the diffusion tensor matrix. Three diffusion indices: fractional anisotropy (FA), Trace/3 apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), and volume ratio (VR) were measured within seven representative regions of interest (ROIs) from internal capsule, corpus callosum, caudate nucleus, hippocampus, thalamus, fornix, and cerebral cortex. Experimental results show much higher scalar contrast and more accurate fiber structures based on the FA weighted color map and fiber orientation map, indicating this high angular DTI technique at 7T is an accurate scheme to map the microstructures in fixed dog brains, which is also applicable for studying the functional microanatomy of other animal models.

Keywords: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), dog brain, white matter, microanatomy.