Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 31, 2025
Quantification of Optic Nerve Cross Sectional Area on MRI: A Novel Protocol using Fiji Software
Published on: September 4, 2021
Evaluation of simultaneous multi-slice readout-segmented diffusion-weighted MRI acquisition in human optic nerve
Hiromasa Takemura1, Wei Liu2, Hideto Kuribayashi3
1Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), Advanced ICT Research Institute, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Suita, Japan; Division of Sensory and Cognitive Brain Mapping, Department of System Neuroscience, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Japan; Graduate Institute for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI, Hayama, Japan.
Abstract:
Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is the only available method to measure the tissue properties of white matter tracts in living human brains and has opened avenues for neuroscientific and clinical studies on human white matter. However, dMRI using conventional simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) single-shot echo planar imaging (ssEPI) still presents challenges in the analyses of some specific white matter tracts, such as the optic nerve, which are heavily affected by susceptibility-induced artifacts. In this study, we evaluated dMRI data acquired by using SMS readout-segmented EPI (rsEPI), which aims to reduce susceptibility-induced artifacts by dividing the acquisition space into multiple segments along the readout direction to reduce echo spacing. To this end, we acquired dMRI data from 11 healthy volunteers by using SMS ssEPI and SMS rsEPI, and then compared the dMRI data of the human optic nerve between the SMS ssEPI and SMS rsEPI datasets by visual inspection of the datasets and statistical comparisons of fractional anisotropy (FA) values. In comparison with the SMS ssEPI data, the SMS rsEPI data showed smaller susceptibility-induced distortion and exhibited a significantly higher FA along the optic nerve. In summary, this study demonstrates that despite its prolonged acquisition time, SMS rsEPI is a promising approach for measuring the tissue properties of the optic nerve in living humans and will be useful for future neuroscientific and clinical investigations of this pathway.
