High-Resolution 3D MRI Brain Imaging

We acquired 3-dimensional T1 turbo field echo (TFE), 3-dimensional fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), and diffusion tensor imaging sequences using 3.0T MRI scanners (Philips, Best, the Netherlands). The MR imaging was performed following the protocol described in our previous work^{49 (link),50 (link)}. The 3-dimensional T1 MRI data were acquired using the following imaging parameters: sagittal slice thickness, 1.0 mm with 50% overlap; no gap; repetition time of 9.9 ms; echo time of 4.6 ms; flip angle of 8°; and matrix size of 240 × 240 pixels reconstructed to 480 × 480 over a field of view of 240 mm. In whole-brain DTI-MRI examination, sets of axial diffusion-weighted single-shot echo-planar images were collected with the following parameters: 128 3 128 acquisition matrix; 1.72 3 1.72 3 2 mm³ voxel size; 70 axial slices; 22 3 22 cm² field of view; echo time 60 ms, repetition time 7,696 ms; flip angle 90°; slice gap 0 mm; b-factor of 600 s/mm². Diffusion-weighted images were acquired from 45 different directions using the baseline image without weighting (0, 0, 0). All axial sections were acquired parallel to the anterior commissure–posterior commissure line.