The non-echoplanar technique can generate image slices without air-bone susceptibility artefacts and distortion, as thin as 2 3 mm producing a high resolution matrix, which is essential for the detection of tiny cholesteatoma pearls (Fig. 3).
Even though echoplanar DWI has a shorter acquisition time, non-echoplanar DWI performs better than its echoplanar counterpart primarily due to the lack of air-bone susceptibility artefact and distortion at the temporal bones [3, 6].
Finally, we created an additional mask of irrelevant voxels by including all voxels that had been identified as false positive CMBs (e.g. from basal ganglia calcification [23] or air-bone susceptibility artefacts) in any of our 44 healthy controls.
Note that air-bone susceptibility effects were the dominant source of artefacts (false positives) over our 44 controls, in particular at the edges of the inferior temporal, orbitofrontal and posterior fossa regions.
Third, all regions of the "skull" class, including the artificial hypointensities around the cortex (e.g. air-bone susceptibility effects at the skull base), were used as a mask and removed from the CMB class.
In MLAA_GMM, Dixon MR images are segmented into outside air, fat/soft tissue classes and an MR low-intensity class corresponding to air cavities, bone and susceptibility artifacts.
There is a wide variation in disease severity within PDB patients; whilst some remain asymptomatic, others present with a range of symptoms including bone pain, susceptibility to fracture and deformity.
