Brain and cervical spinal cord myelination and age-related changes in adulthood: a preliminary study based on ihMTsat and T1 relaxometry mapping

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Inhomogeneous Magnetization Transfer (ihMT) has shown to be a biomarker of myelin with enhanced specificity as compared to conventional MT. To compensate for B1+ and T1 effects, a 3D ihMT-RAGE sequence with an ihMTsat framework has recently been proposed. In this study, ihMTsat was used in combination with an optimized MP2RAGE sequence to study both brain and spinal cord adulthood aging process. The ihMTsat and R1=1/T1 metrics followed an inverse U-shaped evolution with age in different ROIs, from which a maturation age was extracted. A multiparametric (R1,ihMTsat) voxel-wise analysis revealed significant age effect in the microstructure of different cord tracts.