HIGH CONTRAST T-WEIGTHED MRI WITH FLUID AND WHITE SUPPRESSION USING MP2RAGE

A novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequence called fluid and white matter suppression (FLAWS) was recently proposed for brain imaging at 3T. This sequence provides two co-registered 3D-MRI datasets of Ti-weighted images. The voxel-wise division of these two datasets yields contrast enhanced images that have been used in preoperative Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) planning. In the current study, we propose a new way of combining the two 3D-MRI FLAWS datasets to increase the contrast-to-noise ratio of the resulting images. Furthermore, since many centers performing DBS are equipped with I.5T MRI systems, we also optimized the FLAWS sequence parameters for the data acquisition at the field strength of 1.5T.