Visualization of subthalamic nuclei with cortex attenuated inversion recovery MR imaging

There is a significant amount of interest in studying the thalamus because of its central location in the brain and its role as a gatekeeper to higher centers of cognition. Imaging and measuring of the individual subnuclei of the thalamus has proven extremely difficult in MR because of the contrast-to-noise (CNR) of the MR sequences used. This report describes a novel MR pulse sequence known as cortex attenuated inversion recovery (CAIR), which increases the CNR in images and allows the individual subnuclei of the thalamus to be visualized by selectively nulling the gray matter in the brain using an inversion recovery sequence with an inversion time of 700 ms at 1.5 T.