A Multicenter Preclinical MRI Study: Definition of Rat Brain Relaxometry Reference Maps.

Similarly to human population imaging, there are several well-founded motivations for animal population imaging, the most notable being the improvement of the validity of statistical results by pooling a sufficient number of animal data provided by different imaging centers. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of such a multicenter animal study, sharing raw data from forty rats and processing pipelines between four imaging centers. As specific use case, we focused on T1 and T2 mapping of the healthy rat brain at 7T.