Masaya Takahashi1, Osamu Togao1, Makoto Obara2, Marc van Cauteren2, Yoshiharu Ohno3, Craig Malloy1, Makoto Kuro-o4, Ivan Dimitrov1,5
1Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA; 2Philips Electronics Japan, Tokyo, Japan; 3Radiology, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, Hyogo, Japan; 4Pathology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA; 5Philips Medical Systems, Cleveland, OH, USA
The recent development of techniques has made possible detailed, non-invasive imaging of pulmonary parenchyma. The utility of ultra-short TE (UTE) imaging in conjunction with projection acquisition of the free inducting decay helps to acquire the MR signal from the lung parenchyma. It allows us to reduce TE up to less than 100 sec to minimize signal decay caused by short T2 relaxation time, and brings high SNR rather than a conventional FFT short echo image sequence. Here we report our measure of short T2 relaxation time of the lung in the wild-type and emphysematous mice using three-dimensional UTE imaging.