Development of Quantitative Magnetization Transfer Imaging for the Human Cervical Spinal Cord at 3 Tesla

Motivation: We proposed to use a method known as selective inversion recovery (SIR), which allows one to perform the entire QMT (quantitative magnetization transfer) experiment from a conventional inversion recovery sequence. Goal(s): To translate the SIR-QMT method to the spinal cord at 3T with optimized sampling schemes to yield high-resolution cervical spinal cord PSR (macromolecular pool-size-ratios) maps within clinically relevant scan times. Approach: SIR-QMT was conducted on two healthy volunteers to calculate PSR and R1f. Results: These results suggest that QMT imaging can be performed in the human cervical spinal cord at 3T. Impact: The work has important clinical indication to study de/remyelination and nerve injuries/repairs in spinal cord disorders.