Accurate T1 and T2 Maps Obtained with IR-TrueFISP Calibrated by a Patient Driven Model

Ralf Berthold Loeffler¹, Song Wu², Nicole van Groningen¹, Zoltan Patay¹, John O. Glass¹, Matthew P. Smeltzer², Claudia Maria Hillenbrand¹

Quantitative IR-TrueFISP T1 and T2 maps are sensitive to variation in the RF excitation pulse. To overcome this problem we developed a model for the transformation of IR-TrueFISP derived relaxation parameters in a large patient data set toward gold standard reference signals by density-varying calibration functions fitted through a natural cubic spline. We were able to create a calibration function that transforms the IR-TrueFISP such that the fitting error between the conventional data and the IR-TrueFISP data became very small and showed almost no bias, especially for the T2 values, which are usually more error prone.