Matthew F. Koff1, Atsushi Takahashi2, Hollis Potter1
1Department of Radiology and Imaging, Hospital for Special Surgery, New York, NY, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA
The knee meniscus typically displays low signal on standard clinical images. Ultrashort echo (UTE) imaging creates contrast for meniscal visualization and T2* quantitation. This study evaluated the effects of UTE acquisition resolution and inter-echo timings on calculated T2* values. Ex-vivo sheep knees were scanned and the number of arms and inter-echo times of the radial sequence were varied. Higher resolution and longer inter-echo spaced images produced longer T2* values. The average maximum T2* difference from all methods was 1.2ms. This study will aid in the development of optimal UTE scanning parameters for clinical investigation of the meniscus.