Imaging Nigrosome-1 using Wave-CAIPI Susceptibility Weighted Imaging at 3T

In this work, the ability of Wave-CAIPI accelerated 3D SWI for imaging the Nigrosome-1(N1) sign was evaluated. Short-TE, long-TE and conventional SWI protocols were compared for the detection of the N1 sign. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were used to evaluate the presence or absence of the N1 sign and the contrast-to-noise (CNR) of the N1 sign relative to adjacent tissues. The results showed that Wave-CAIPI SWI had no significant differences with conventional SWI for recognizing the N1 sign. Wave-CAIPI SWI can be a replacement of conventional SWI (4 min 52s) with shorter scan times of 2min 26s covering the whole brain.