Courtesy of Dr David Alexander Dickie, this image shows scans from the first clinical patient study being conducted on the the first 7T clinical MRI scanner in Scotland: the 7T Siemens Terra system at the Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) in Glasgow. The study is comparing blood vessel density between areas of White Matter Hyperintensity (WMH) and normal appearing white matter in the brains of people with recent minor stroke or transient ischaemic attack.

Images acquired at 7T using a FLAIR sequence (left) and a SWI sequence (right) in the same patient illustrate some features of small vessel disease (white areas in the centre of the left image; superimposed in red on the right image) interacting with blood vessels (in black on the right image). One potential mechanism of small vessel disease is thought to be small pockets of ischemia, and these initial clinical scans suggest this may be detectable in vivo at 7T – there are almost no visible vessels in the WMH areas (in red on the right image).