Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping in Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Summary
Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) is an advanced post-processing technique in MRI that computes the spatial distribution of tissue magnetic susceptibility from phase measurements. By deconvolving the measured field perturbations with a dipole response, QSM yields quantitative maps of paramagnetic and diamagnetic components, notably iron, calcium and myelin. These maps have proven invaluable for characterising normal brain architecture, detecting microbleeds, assessing neurodegenerative iron accumulation and monitoring demyelination. Recent technical advances have addressed longstanding challenges such as the ill-posed nature of dipole inversion, phase unwrapping artefacts and anisotropic microstructural contributions in white matter. Machine learning and regularisation strategies now enable rapid, robust reconstructions across different field strengths and orientations. Clinically, QSM offers non-invasive biomarkers for multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinsonism and brain tumours, with potential applications in haemodynamic studies and contrast-agent biodistribution. As acquisition and computational workflows converge, QSM is poised to become a routine quantitative tool, bridging research and clinical practice in neuroimaging.
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Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping in Magnetic Resonance Imaging publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in quantitative susceptibility mapping in magnetic resonance imaging across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM): A computational MRI technique that reconstructs tissue magnetic susceptibility distributions by solving an inverse problem on phase-derived field maps.
Magnetic susceptibility: A dimensionless parameter quantifying how a material becomes magnetised in response to an applied magnetic field, reflecting molecular composition and iron content.
Dipole inversion: The mathematical deconvolution process by which measured local magnetic fields are converted into spatial susceptibility values, accounting for the dipolar field pattern of each voxel.
Phase unwrapping: The procedure that removes 2π discontinuities from MRI phase data to recover continuous field maps necessary for accurate susceptibility estimation.
Regularisation: A strategy to stabilise the ill-posed inverse problem in QSM by incorporating prior information or constraints—such as smoothness or sparsity—to suppress noise and artefacts.
Radiomics: The extraction and analysis of large numbers of quantitative imaging features from medical images, enabling the identification of subtle tissue characteristics and disease signatures.
References
- Plug-and-Play latent feature editing for orientation-adaptive quantitative susceptibility mapping neural networks. Medical Image Analysis (2024).
- Multiparametric MRI dataset for susceptibility-based radiomic feature extraction and analysis. Scientific Data (2024).
- Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM): Decoding MRI data for a tissue magnetic biomarker. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (2014).
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