Optimising an Acquisition Protocol and Pipeline for Robust Clinical Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping to Investigate Movement Disorders

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) has been used to investigate movement disorders but has not been integrated into routine clinical practice. We developed an acquisition protocol and a robust QSM pipeline for neuroradiological investigation of movement disorders. We show that high quality QSMs can be acquired using a multi-echo 3D gradient-echo sequence with partial k-space filling in under 6 minutes with only one of eleven patient QSMs corrupted by motion artifacts. We show that Laplacian phase unwrapping and projection onto dipole fields (PDF) background field removal are robust to artifacts across patients with strong susceptibility sources associated with various pathologies.