Magnetom 3t allegra mri system

Diffusion weighted images were acquired on a Siemens Magnetom 3T Allegra MRI system (Allegra MR2004A, Germany) with an RF transmit/receive head coil using a spin-echo, echo-planar sequence and including 45 non-collinear directions. To overcome limitations with scanning smaller volumes of tissue, voltage was reduced to optimise signal and the head coil was loaded with a wet clay inlay (40×40 cm with a thickness of 2 cm, standard sculpting clay commercially bought – white stoneware clay with grog). Images were obtained in the transverse plane with both anterior–posterior and posterior–anterior phase encoding to control for anatomic distortions and increase signal-to-noise. Parameters were as follows: repetition time (TR) 7900 ms; echo time (TE) 90 ms; slice thickness 1.6 mm; held of view 160 mm; voxel size 1.3 × 1.3 × 1.6 mm³; b-values 0 and 1000 s/mm². Scan time per phase encoding acquisition was 6:27 min with a total time of 12 : 54 min for both acquisitions.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was acquired at the Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre (CUBIC), Tygerberg, Cape Town. Images were acquired on a Siemens Magnetom 3T Allegra MRI system (Erlangen, Germany) with a RF transmit/receive head coil. To overcome limitations with scanning smaller volumes of tissue, voltage was reduced to optimize signal, and the head coil was loaded with a wet clay inlay (40×40 cm with a thickness of 2 cm, standard sculpting clay commercially bought – white stoneware clay with grog).
A 3D T2 image was acquired on the 3T Siemens Allegra in the sagittal direction with the following parameters: FOV = 160×160 mm, TR = 3500 ms, TE = 354 ms, 128 slices, in-plane resolution = 1.3×1.3 mm and a slice thickness of 1.0 mm. The sequence scan time was 5 min 41 s.