Sense cardiac coil

This study included 72 fetuses recruited from routine clinical examinations at Vienna General Hospital (AKH). The average gestational age of subjects was 28+0.6 (range: 19+5–39+2) weeks. None of the cases showed any neurological pathologies. Pregnant women were scanned on a 1.5T clinical scanner (Philips Medical Systems, Best, Netherlands) using a sensitivity encoding (SENSE) cardiac coil with five elements, and no contrast agents or sedatives were administered. Consecutive T2-weighted scans were acquired in approximate axial, coronal, and sagittal planes of the fetal brain with an in-plane resolution of 0.78–0.9 and slice thickness of 3–4.4 . These scans were used to obtain individualized segmentations as will be explained in the next section. Moreover, blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) images were acquired with following the parameters: TR/TE = 3000/50 ms, matrix size of 144 144, in-plane resolution = 1.74 1.74 , slice thickness = 3 , flip angle = 90 , and 96 volumes per acquisition. During each TR interval, 18 slices were acquired with interleaved slice ordering (1-4-7...2-5-8...3-6-9..) to minimize cross-talk between adjacent slices.
The study protocol was approved by the institutional ethical boards at AKH and Medical University of Vienna, and research was conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.

MR measurements were performed on a 3.0 T MR imaging system (Achieva, Philips Medical Systems, Best, The Netherlands) using a SENSE cardiac coil and the data post processing was performed by an experienced MR physicist. The participants were examined in the supine position. Liver fat content (LFC) and muscle fat content (MFC) were measured by MRS. MFC was measured in the psoas muscle. Visceral adipose tissue (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) volumes were measured by MRI, assessed from a transverse slice of 10 mm thickness at the level of the third lumbar vertebra. The details of the applied methodology of MRI and MRS have previously been described [1 (link), 2 (link)].
Hepatic steatosis was defined as an LFC >5 % [20 (link)] and muscular steatosis was defined as an MFC >5 % [2 (link)].

Lipid accumulation in the liver was measured before and after overfeeding with a high fat diet. All measurements were performed on a 3.0 T Philips Achieva scanner (Philips Healthcare, Best, The Netherlands) using a SENSE-cardiac coil [34 (link)]. A single voxel of 20 × 20 × 20 mm³ was positioned in the right liver lobe, avoiding large biliary or vascular structures [34 (link)]. Spectra were acquired using a point-resolved spectroscopy sequence PRESS [34 (link)] with repetition time of 4000 ms, echo time of 33 ms, and number of averages of 64. To minimize the motion artifacts, subjects were asked to breathe in the rhythm of the measurement and to be at end-expiration during acquisition of spectra [35 ]. To determine the intensity of the lipid peak, the water signal was suppressed using frequency-selective prepulses. The unsuppressed water resonance was used as internal reference (number of averages = 16). The spectra were fitted with AMARES [36 (link)] in the jMRUI software [37 (link)]. Values are given as T2-corrected ratios of the CH₂ peak, relative to the unsuppressed water resonance (as percentage) according to Hamilton et al. [38 ].