Fast and reproducible in vivo T1 mapping of the human cervical spinal cord

Purpose To develop a fast and robust method for measuring T1 in the whole cervical spinal cord in vivo, and to assess its reproducibility. Methods A spatially nonselective adiabatic inversion pulse is combined with zonally oblique-magnified multislice echo-planar imaging to produce a reduced field-of-view inversion-recovery echo-planar imaging protocol. Multi- inversion time data are obtained by cycling slice order throughout sequence repetitions. Measurement of T1 is performed using 12 inversion times for a total protocol duration of 7 min. Reproducibility of regional T1 estimates is assessed in a scan-rescan experiment on five heathy subjects. Results Regional mean (standard deviation) T1 was: 1108.5 (±77.2) ms for left lateral column, 1110.1 (±83.2) ms for right lateral column, 1150.4 (±102.6) ms for dorsal column, and 1136.4 (±90.8) ms for gray matter. Regional T1 estimates showed good correlation between sessions (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.89 (P value < 0.01); mean difference = 2 ms, 95% confidence interval ± 20 ms); and high reproducibility (intersession coefficient of variation approximately 1% in all the regions considered, intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.88 (P value < 0.01, confidence interval 0.71–0.95)). Conclusions T1 estimates in the cervical spinal cord are reproducible using inversion-recovery zonally oblique-magnified multislice echo-planar imaging. The short acquisition time and large coverage of this method paves the way for accurate T1 mapping for various spinal cord pathologies. Magn Reson Med, 2017. © 2017 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.