Roland Krug1, Andrew J. Burghardt1, Kathryn E. Hammond1, Suchandrima Banerjee2, Douglas A.C. Kelley2, Ahi S. Issever1, Thomas M. Link1, Sharmila Majumdar1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, San Francisco, CA, USA
In this work we tested the hypothesis that measurements of intervoxel and intravoxel signal dephasing in the trabecular network can provide important information about the trabecular topological and structural organization at 7T and 3T. We imaged bone specimens with a CHASE sequence on a 7T and 3T whole body MR scanner and analyzed phase measures from the resulting images. We also derived topological and structural measurements from 3D high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) scans at an isotropic voxel size of 41um. Excellent correlations were obtained between MR phase measurements and topological bone parameters measured from HR-pQCT images. We concluded that phase MRI at 7T is feasible and has the ability to provide additional topological and structural information of bone architecture.