Section: Scientific Foundations

High-field MRI

High field MRI as performed at Neurospin (7T on humans, 11.7T in 2013, 17.6T on rats) brings an improvement over traditional MRI acquisitions at 1.5T or 3T, related to to a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the data. Depending on the data and applicative context, this gain in SNR can be traded against spatial resolution improvements, thus helping in getting more detailed views of brain structure and function. This comes at the risk of higher susceptibility distortions of the MRI scans and signal inhomogeneities, that need to be corrected for. Improvements at the acquisition level may come from the use of new coils (such as the new 32 channels coil on the 7T at Neurospin – Fall 2011).