Kinosada Y, Nakagawa T
Department of Radiology, School of Medicine, Mie University, Japan.
Front Med Biol Eng. 1994;6(1):37-49.
We have developed a new non-invasive technique to visualize three-dimensional anatomical structures of myelinated white matter tracts of the human brain in vivo. The basic principle of our idea is the combination of the magnetic resonance (MR) imaging technique, which represents the myelinated white matter tracts as hyperintense signal areas, and the post-image processing technique, which extracts only hyperintense areas on the image. The intravoxel incoherent motion imaging sequence was used for the former step. The maximum intensity projection method, on the other hand, was utilized for the latter step. To examine the clinical usefulness of the idea, normal volunteers and selected patients with paralysis were investigated on a 1.5 Tesla MR system. The structure of white matter tracts of normal volunteers was found to be in good agreement with known anatomy. The structure of the nerve fiber system of patients with paralysis, on the other hand, reflected some abnormalities of the nerve fibers and correlated with clinical symptoms. Some results of clinical examinations with our proposed technique showed great promise for the study of neuroanatomy and neuroradiology.
我们开发了一种新的非侵入性技术，用于在体内可视化人类大脑有髓白质束的三维解剖结构。我们这一想法的基本原理是将磁共振（MR）成像技术（该技术将有髓白质束表示为高信号区域）与图像后处理技术相结合，后者仅提取图像上的高信号区域。前一步骤使用了体素内不相干运动成像序列。另一方面，后一步骤采用了最大强度投影法。为了检验这一想法的临床实用性，我们在一台1.5特斯拉的MR系统上对正常志愿者和选定的瘫痪患者进行了研究。发现正常志愿者的白质束结构与已知解剖结构高度吻合。另一方面，瘫痪患者的神经纤维系统结构反映了神经纤维的一些异常情况，且与临床症状相关。我们所提出技术的一些临床检查结果显示出在神经解剖学和神经放射学研究方面具有巨大潜力。
