Magnetization Transfer (MT) Segmentation of foot peripheral nerves at 3 T

Introduction The ability of tracking peripheral nerves in foot could be of great benefit for a number of clinical and research applications, which include traumas, diabetes and infections. Previous approaches to nerve tracking have employed diffusion tensor imaging (DTI, [1, 2]), which is a well established method of fiber tracking in the central nervous system. In the peripheral nervous system (PNS), however, one limitation of DTI is the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to short T2 of water protons in nerve [3-5]. Furthermore, in imaging of foot nerves, the low SNR is exacerbated by the need of the high spatial-resolution (≤ 300μm) required to visualize the small nerves. Here, we propose a novel approach to nerve visualization, which exploits the difference in magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) between muscle and foot nerves.