Susceptibility and size quantification of small human veins from an MRI method

Recently a method called CISSCO (Complex Image Summation around a Spherical or a Cylindrical Object) was introduced for accurately quantifying the susceptibility and the radius of any narrow cylindrical object at any orientation using a typical two-echo gradient echo sequence. This work further optimizes the method for quantifying oxygen saturation in small cerebral veins in the human brain. The revised method is first validated through numerical simulations and then applied to data from phantom and human brain. The effect of phase high pass filtering on the quantified parameters is studied and procedures for mitigating its adverse effects are suggested. Uncertainty of each measurement is estimated from the error propagation method. It is shown that the revised method allows for accurate quantification of both the vessel size and its oxygen saturation even in the case of a low SNR (signal to noise ratio) in the vein. The results are self consistent across different veins within a given subject with a variation of less than 6%. Finally, imaging parameters and some procedures are suggested for accurate susceptibility and radius quantifications of small human veins.