Jiang Du1, Atsushi M. Takahashi2, Sheronda Statum1, Reni Biswas1, Christine B. Chung1, Graeme M. Bydder1
1Radiology, University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA; 2Global Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare Technologies, Menlo Park, CA, USA
There is increased interest in imaging short T2 species such as the meniscii, tendons and cortical bone. These tissues show little or no signal with conventional MR sequences. Short T2 contrast is typically generated either with echo subtraction or long 90a saturation pulses followed by gradient dephasing. Here we report on a 3D UTE sequence (minimum TE = 8 s) using several long T2 suppression techniques including long T2 saturation, adiabatic inversion, dual echo subtraction, and combinations of these. The efficacy of these approaches was demonstrated through in vitro and in vivo imaging of meniscii, tendons and cortical bone.