Quantitative relaxation templates for the human brain at 3T

The development of brain Magentic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is driving increasing demand for quantitative measurements. Quantitative MRI (qMRI) templates of relaxation times and proton density can be of particular interest for dedicated clinical applications such as characterizing brain tissue abnormalities, as well as general research purposes. In this paper, we have developed 3D qMRI statistical templates consisting of T₁, T₂, T₂* and ρ* maps from the human brain at 3T. The qMRI templates were built from a population of 20 normal controls, for which individual maps were estimated in a robust manner, accounting for acquisition artifacts and expected relationships between the relaxometry parameters. For validation, we fed the qMRI templates into a realistic MRI simulator to synthesize MR-weighted images, and compared these images with the real MR acquisitions. High correlation coefficients (>0.80) show that the developed qMRI templates can be used as input dataset for MRI simulation community, which may be of great interest to clinical neuroscience field.