Assessing Topographic Structural Connectivity of the Human Basal Ganglia and Thalamus

Irtiza A. Gilani; Kader K. Oguz; Huseyin Boyaci; Katja Doerschner

Structural MRI. T1-weighted images were acquired with a Siemens standard 3D magnetizationprepared rapid acquisition gradient-echo (MP-RAGE) sequence. MP-RAGE incorporates an inversion pulse to enhance the T1 weighting and obtains excellent contrast between gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) in the cortical and subcortical regions of the brain. In this work, MP-RAGE sequence was used with the following parameters: 176 slices; field of view (FoV), 256 x 224 mm; matrix, 256 x 256; 1 mm 3 isotropic voxels; sagittal, phase encoding in anterior/posterior; repetition time (TR), 2600 ms; echo time (TE), 3.02 ms; inversion time (TI), 900 ms; flip angle, 8 degrees; bandwidth, 130 Hz/pixel; echo spacing, 8.9 ms; parallel imaging, GRAPPA with an acceleration factor of 2 along the phase-encoding direction; phase partial Fourier, 6/8; slice partial author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.