Center for Functional MRI In the Department of Radiology

Susceptibility Weighted Imaging



Susceptibility Weighted Imaging (SWI) is a relatively new data acquisition and processing technique that provides the high resolution mapping of the brain’s venous vasculature.
It combines the phase and magnitude data to generate an image whose contrast is sensitive to deoxygenated blood and iron content.
The data acquisition and post processing steps needed to generate SWI images and the minimum Intensity Projection (mIP) are available on this page as beta.
The mIP is a two-dimensional top down view of a stack of processed SWI images where each pixel corresponds to the minimum signal intensity.

The following figure is an example mIP generated by the in-house SWI post processing program.


The SWI protocol is available both on 3TE and 3TW scanners.

The protocol is under site/head/SWI-CFMRI.

A detailed instruction manual is available here.

SWI postprocessing software(Matlab-based):

Recent Updates:

09/11/2012: Capability for processing DICOM files (real & imaginary) generated from the new fast SWI protocol.

07/16/2012: Added option to export processed data as DICOMs.

07/03/2012: Supports matrix size other than 512x512. Supports data acquired with 32-channel coil.

11/17/2010: Added 20x P-file support. Added the sigmoid masking option.

Download links:

swi_v3.0.tar - Postprocessing software to generate SWI mIPs.

If you would like to schedule a training session for SWI data acquisition and processing, please contact David Shin.

Software version
additional functionality
V1.0
Original release
V2.0
22x support, addition of sigmoid filter, support for matrix size other than 512, support for data acquired w/ 32-channel coil
V2.1
Added an option to save the mIP and susceptibility weighted images as DICOMs
V3.0
Added support for new fast SWI protocol. User can choose a folder containing DICOMs (mag/real/imaginary) instead of selecting a P-file.