The “hMRI Toolbox” for quantitative imaging & in vivo histology using MRI

Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) finds increasing application in neuroscience and clinical research due to its greater specificity and its sensitivity to microstructural properties of brain tissue, such as myelin, iron and water concentration. We introduce the “hMRI Toolbox”, an easy-to-use open-source tool for generating and processing quantitative MRI data. This toolbox is embedded in the SPM framework, profiting from the high accuracy spatial registration in common space and the variety of available statistical analyses. It allows the estimation of quantitative MRI maps, precisely longitudinal (R1=1/T1) and effective transverse (R2*=1/T2*) relaxation rates, proton density (PD) and magnetization transfer (MT), followed by spatial registration in common space for statistical analysis. The calculation of other or novel MRI biomarkers of tissue microstructure could be added. The hMRI toolbox can be downloaded from http://hmri.info.