Bone QSM

[Francesca Rossi]

Dear all,

I'm a PhD student interested in bone QSM. During my master thesis I performed QSM on brain and I now need to apply it to bone tissue. I read you paper "Bone quantitative susceptibility mapping using a Chemical Species-specific R2* ..." and I would like to reproduce your work by applying the same sequence on a 3T Siemens Scanner and process the data in the same way. As I'm new to the subject I think it could be a good way to start and better understand the processing pipeline, in particular the w-f separation step.

I downloaded the tool and focused on the SPURS_GC folder. Spurs_gc.m code performs w/f separation using IDEAL-R2*, is there an implementation allowing to MP-IDEAL (I saw the reference to Huanzhou Yu work in your paper)?

In Spurs_gc.m, the input file is requested to be a 4D multiecho data, as I will acquire 5D data(multicoil and multiecho), do I need to combine phase images from different coils previously by complex coil combination? If not, is the combination performed by Fit_ppm:complex.m?

At the moment I'm just studying the processing pipeline, I should be able to acquire some data in a few weeks (scanner actually out of order).

I apologize for the amount of questions, any advices/suggestion/papers on bone QSM are welcome.

Thank you for your attention and your time

Best regards

Francesca