An Investigation of Signal Characteristics and T1 Relaxation Time in Brain MR Images of Young versus Old Healthy Adults

Hayriye Aktaş Dinçer, Didem Gökçay

2018

Abstract

During healthy aging, the brain undergoes several structural changes such as atrophy and volumetric changes. Although less evident, changes in tissue concentration also occur. Such differences in brain tissues introduce prominent low contrast effects to the MRI images of the aging population, causing segmentation problems in the data processing pipeline. Measures of tissue characteristics such as T1 provide unique and complementary information to widely used measures of brain signal characteristics. In this study, multiple Fast Low Angle Shot (FLASH) images are collected for T1 mapping of whole brains from young and old adults. Tissue signal characteristics are evaluated on predefined regions and compared across Magnetization Prepared Rapid Gradient Echo (MPRAGE) and T1 maps. Additionally, segmentation performance is analyzed. As a result, we found that T1 maps are superior to MPRAGE protocol in terms of contrast, especially within sub-cortical areas. Furthermore, degradation of grey-white-ratio (GWR) due to aging processes is observed to be less pronounced in T1 estimated whole brain images. Moreover, sensitivity of T1 maps (54.6%) are higher than MPRAGE images (34.4%) in detection of sub-cortical gray matter. In sum we concur that T1 maps provide better avenues to investigate age related morphological changes in the brain.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Aktaş Dinçer H. and Gökçay D. (2018). An Investigation of Signal Characteristics and T1 Relaxation Time in Brain MR Images of Young versus Old Healthy Adults. In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS; ISBN 978-989-758-279-0, SciTePress, pages 147-154. DOI: 10.5220/0006570401470154

in Bibtex Style

@conference{biosignals18,
author={Hayriye Aktaş Dinçer and Didem Gökçay},
title={An Investigation of Signal Characteristics and T1 Relaxation Time in Brain MR Images of Young versus Old Healthy Adults},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS},
year={2018},
pages={147-154},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006570401470154},
isbn={978-989-758-279-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS
TI - An Investigation of Signal Characteristics and T1 Relaxation Time in Brain MR Images of Young versus Old Healthy Adults
SN - 978-989-758-279-0
AU - Aktaş Dinçer H.
AU - Gökçay D.
PY - 2018
SP - 147
EP - 154
DO - 10.5220/0006570401470154
PB - SciTePress