Hypercholesterolemia has been identified as a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. In this study, rabbits were fed either a cholesterol diet or normal chow diet for 24 months. At endpoint, in vivo MRI was performed at the field strength of 3 Tesla using fast imaging employing steady state acquisition without (FIESTA) or with susceptibility-weighted post-processing (SWI-FIESTA) and susceptibility-weighted imaging with multi-echo acquisition (SWAN). This imaging revealed signal voids/hypointensities throughout the cortex, sub-cortex, and hippocampus of cholesterol-fed animals compared to control animals. Quantitative image analysis corroborated these qualitative findings and highlighted that SWI processing of FIESTA images significantly improved the detectability of plaques (p