Abstract #2409

Deoni S

Multi-component T1 and T2 relaxation arising from exchanging water pools with different physical environments has been observed in several biological tissues. In this we investigate the effect of chemical exchange on the fully-balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) imaging signal by solving for the steady-state signal of the Bloch-McConnell expressions. We show that at low TR (5ms), the effect of exchange is negligible on the signal from each exchanging species and, therefore, the SSFP signal can be expressed as a linear summation of each species. This result suggests the future possibility of using SSFP to observe and measure multi-component relaxation in vivo.