Thanks @northernthrux.bsky.social! I'm very touched by the compliment

Many thanks to everyone involved, particularly Quentin Raynaud, but also Rita Oliveira, Nadège Corbin, Yael Balbastre, @ruudmri.bsky.social and @mfcallaghan.bsky.social

Note that an implementation of ISME in a 3D GRE sequence is available for download in the Teamplay C2P exchange platform of Siemens Healthineers

This approach is compatible with most sampling trajectories (linear, spiral, radial,..) and data acquisition strategies (e.g. GRE, EPTI,...).

We show that this new approach (ISME – ‘incoherent sampling of multi-echo data’) improves the reproducibility of R2* and QSM maps by 25%! The R2* maps are also visually sharper, particularly at high resolution.

The key idea is beautifully simple: data acquisition is reordered such that the multi-echo data is acquired at different phases of the cardiac cycle. Cardiac-induced noise is then effectively averaged-out in the estimation of R2* or magnetic susceptibility (QSM).

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Thanks to @unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social and @snsf-ch.bsky.social for their support!

A big thank you to everyone involved, mainly Ana Rita Oliveira for her hard work but also Quentin Raynaud @ijelescu.bsky.social Evgeniya Kirilina and Valerij Kiselev!!

I am delighted with this work because it is an important step towards the use of MRI as a non-invasive tool to monitor microscopic brain change in neurological diseases. The assessment of iron distribution is of particular relevance for the study of e.g. #ParkinsonsDisease.

- In the substantia nigra, the estimates of volume fraction and intra-cellular iron concentration show a good match with those from histological studies.

- From the estimates of the model parameters that describe this signal behaviour, we attempt to characterize the microscopic distribution of the inclusions at the source of this effect.

- Using numerical simulations we show that in the substantia nigra (SN), iron-rich dopaminergic neurons can be at the source of this effect

- Thanks to extensive preliminary work to improve data quality, we show compelling evidence for the presence of non-exponential behaviour at short echo times, consistent with the effect of microscopic magnetic inclusions (e.g., blood vessels and iron-rich cells).