Small animal mr scanner

All MRI scans were performed on a 9.4T Bruker small animal MR scanner equipped with a ¹H/¹⁹F dual-tunable volume RF coil (35 mm inner diameter, 50 mm length; Rapid Biomed, Würzburg, Germany), located in the Small Animal Imaging Facility (SAIF) at Texas Children's Hospital. ¹⁹F images of phantoms were acquired with an MSME scan protocol (excitation bandwidth = 2000 Hz, TR = 2000 ms, TE = 8.95 ms, and scan time = 10 min 40 s). DICOMs obtained from scans were processed using the OsiriX v.5.8.5 software (Pixmeo SARL, Bernex, Switzerland).

On Day 21 after surgery, a venous catheter was placed into the femoral vein and CE-MRI was acquired at 7 Tesla with a small animal MR scanner (Bruker BioSpin GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany) using a transmit/receive mouse head cryoprobe (Bruker BioSpin GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany). Mice weight at Day 21 was 34.1 ± 9.7 g for ICAO and 30.2 ± 7.2 g for Sham. Researchers performing the CE-MRI were blinded to the group assignment. The MRI protocol included the following sequences:
T2-weighted sequences and DSC-MRI FOV covered the whole brain, whereas the CE-MRA FOV only covered the dorsal neocortex. A set of 5 saturation slices with identical geometry was used to suppress aliasing artifacts originating from the signal of the ventral part of the brain.