Meher Juttukonda1, Bryant Mersereau1, Yi Su2, Tammie Benzinger2, David Lalush1, and Hongyu An2
1Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, 2Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, United States
We propose a mapping-based,
quantitative T1 method with patient-specific thresholding for tissue
segmentation and assignment of continuous-valued LACs for soft tissues and
bone. The proposed method utilizes images from a dual flip angle, dual echo
UTE-MR acquisition to segment air, bone, GM, WM, CSF, fat and soft tissue. A
conversion from MR relaxation rate R1 is then utilized to derive
continuous-valued LACs to major tissues in the head/neck. The method has been
validated in PET data from 23 subjects and has been shown to outperform the
vendor UTE method in PET reconstruction accuracy.
