NMR in biomedicine
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Arterial transit time (ATT) prolongation causes an error of cerebral blood flow (CBF) measurement during arterial spin labeling (ASL). To improve the accuracy of ATT and CBF in patients with prolonged ATT, we propose a robust ATT and CBF estimation method for clinical practice. The proposed method consists of a three-delay Hadamard-encoded pseudo-continuous ASL (H-pCASL) with an additional-encoding and single-delay with long-labeled long-delay (1dLLLD) acquisition. ⋯ Improving the SNR of each delay image (even though the number of delays is small) is crucial for ATT estimation. This is opposed to acquiring many delays with short LD. The proposed method confers accurate ATT and CBF estimation within a practical acquisition time in a clinical setting.
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This study introduces a technique called cine magnetic resonance fingerprinting (cine-MRF) for simultaneous T1 , T2 and ejection fraction (EF) quantification. Data acquired with a free-running MRF sequence are retrospectively sorted into different cardiac phases using an external electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. A low-rank reconstruction with a finite difference sparsity constraint along the cardiac motion dimension yields images resolved by cardiac phase. ⋯ Cine-MRF and ECG-triggered cMRF relaxation times were in good agreement. Cine-MRF T1 values were significantly longer than MOLLI, and cine-MRF T2 values were significantly shorter than T2 -prepared FLASH. In summary, cine-MRF can potentially streamline cardiac MRI exams by combining left ventricle functional assessment and T1 -T2 mapping into one time-efficient acquisition.
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The protons in collagen-rich musculoskeletal (MSK) tissues such as the Achilles tendon are subject to strong dipolar interactions which are modulated by the term (3cos2 θ-1) where θ is the angle between the fiber orientation and the static magnetic field B0. The purpose of this study was to investigate the magic angle effect in three-dimensional ultrashort echo time Cones Adiabatic T1ρ (3D UTE Cones-AdiabT1ρ ) imaging of the Achilles tendon using a clinical 3 T scanner. ⋯ On average, Cones-AdiabT1ρ increased 3.6-fold from 13.6 ± 1.5 ms at 0° to 48.4 ± 5.4 ms at 55°, Cones-CW-T1ρ increased 6.1-fold from 7.0 ± 1.1 ms at 0° to 42.6 ± 5.2 ms at 55°, and Cones-T2* increased 12.3-fold from 2.9 ± 0.5 ms at 0° to 35.8 ± 6.4 ms at 55°. Although Cones-AdiabT1ρ is still subject to significant angular dependence, it shows a much-reduced magic angle effect compared to Cones-CW-T1ρ and Cones-T2 *, and may be used as a novel and potentially more effective approach for quantitative evaluation of the Achilles tendon and other MSK tissues.