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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Biomedical Engineering
First Advisor
EWART M. HAACKE
Abstract
The presence and location of brain iron is implicated in a myriad of diseases and conditions, as well as normal aging. In the last decade, quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), an MRI post-processing technique, has gained traction in the research realm to locate and quantify iron through susceptibility measurements. This holds promise clinically to identify abnormal susceptibility as a marker for oxidative stress and inflammation, demyelination and neuronal loss, as well as blood brain barrier and vessel damage, hemorrhaging and blood product. This thesis demonstrates the clinical potential of QSM and is divided into three major sections.Hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) is a genetic disorder caused by the mutation in the HFE gene which causes the body to absorb an abnormal amount of iron in multiple systems and organs. Research on brain iron in HH is lacking, thus, the first work used QSM to show higher susceptibility in the gray matter in a clinical cohort of HH compared to a group of healthy controls. The QSM findings were corroborated by R2* relaxation mapping data, another means of measuring in vivo iron. Though QSM has been validated in phantoms and postmortem histological measurements, some questions remain about its consistency across vendors and imaging parameters. The second work evaluates the robustness of QSM over scans collected with multiple systems and varying MRI collection parameters. Normative data over the adult age range have been generated to provide a prediction of susceptibility as a function of age using both whole structure and thresholded structure approaches. MRI is commonly used as pre-surgical structural mapping tool. The third work relates to demarcating the lateral habenula as a surgical target to treat intractable psychiatric disorders. A scanning protocol using QSM was optimized to locate and quantify the lateral habenula which has not previously been done. This may have great potential for therapeutic and deep brain stimulation treatments. QSM is a robust method for measuring iron and demarcating iron-rich structures in the brain. It is consistent across myriad variables and validated by R2* mapping. It has the potential to be used in clinical cohorts, and the normative data in this work can be used to compare to new individual subject data. Lastly, the habenula and its subnuclei can be located and identified using QSM and true susceptibility weighted imaging for pre-surgical planning and therapeutic interventions.
Recommended Citation
Sethi, Sean Kumar, "Clinical Applications Of Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping" (2024). Wayne State University Dissertations. 3964.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/3964
