7T Diffusion Imaging of Rat by Using SNAILS and Its Application in Stroke Study

INTRODUCTION Diffusion-Weighted Imaging (DWI) can assist physicians in the quality of diagnosis, treatment and outcome prediction, greatly enhancing the care available for stroke patients. Animal stroke studies with DWI are widely investigated to facilitate the development of stroke diagnosis [1]. However, diffusion imaging on small animals at high fields is usually very challenging due to the resolution-SNR tradeoff and hardware imperfection. The widely used single shot Echo Planar Imaging (ssEPI) DWI technique is particularly vulnerable to these factors and tends to produce severe image artifacts. In this work, we demonstrate the implementation of the self-navigated interleaved spirals (SNAILS) technique [2] on our 7T animal scanner. High quality DWI images can be acquired for stroke studies on rats. The preliminary diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) results also seem promising for future animal DTI studies.