Limits of 8-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging spatial resolution of the deoxygenated cerebral microvasculature
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Updated: Aug 7, 2026
Assessing Cortical Cerebral Microinfarcts on High Resolution MR Images
Published on: November 20, 2015
Roger A Dashner1, Allahyar Kangarlu, David L Clark
1Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1228, USA.
Purpose:
To quantify the minimum magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) spatial resolution of the visible deoxygenated microscopic vessels of the human brain at 8 T.
Materials And Methods:
This study compared 8-T gradient echo (GE) images of a human cadaver brain having an in-plane resolution of 195 x 195 microm to corresponding digital photographs of 205 cryomicrotome sections of the same cadaver brain, along with summed images of 25 contiguous cryomicrotome sections. One-millimeter-thick GE images of a 1-cm-thick unfixed whole coronal brain section were acquired using techniques similar to those commonly utilized for 8-T human imaging in vivo.
Results:
There was excellent MR visualization of the deoxygenated microscopic vessels within the brain down to a resolution of approximately 100 microm.
Conclusion:
By taking advantage of magnetic susceptibility-based blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast, deoxygenated microscopic blood vessels smaller than the pixel dimensions used for imaging can be visualized using a whole-body 8-T MRI system.
