Reproducibility of quantitative susceptibility mapping in the brain at two field strengths from two vendors.

Publication Type	Academic Article
Authors	Deh K, Nguyen T, Eskreis-Winkler S, Prince M, Spincemaille P, Gauthier S, Kovanlikaya I, Zhang Y, Wang Y
Journal	J Magn Reson Imaging
Volume	42
Issue	6
Pagination	1592-600
Date Published	05/09/2015
ISSN	1522-2586
Keywords	Brain, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Multiple Sclerosis
Abstract	PURPOSE: To assess the reproducibility of brain quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) in healthy subjects and in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) on 1.5 and 3T scanners from two vendors. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ten healthy volunteers and 10 patients were scanned twice on a 3T scanner from one vendor. The healthy volunteers were also scanned on a 1.5T scanner from the same vendor and on a 3T scanner from a second vendor. Similar imaging parameters were used for all scans. QSM images were reconstructed using a recently developed nonlinear morphology-enabled dipole inversion (MEDI) algorithm with L1 regularization. Region-of-interest (ROI) measurements were obtained for 20 major brain structures. Reproducibility was evaluated with voxel-wise and ROI-based Bland-Altman plots and linear correlation analysis. RESULTS: ROI-based QSM measurements showed excellent correlation between all repeated scans (correlation coefficient R ≥ 0.97), with a mean difference of less than 1.24 ppb (healthy subjects) and 4.15 ppb (patients), and 95% limits of agreements of within -25.5 to 25.0 ppb (healthy subjects) and -35.8 to 27.6 ppb (patients). Voxel-based QSM measurements had a good correlation (0.64 ≤ R ≤ 0.88) and limits of agreements of -60 to 60 ppb or less. CONCLUSION: Brain QSM measurements have good interscanner and same-scanner reproducibility for healthy and MS subjects, respectively, on the systems evaluated in this study.
DOI	10.1002/jmri.24943
PubMed ID	25960320
PubMed Central ID	PMC4661140