Wilfred Wing-Kay Lam1, Angus Zoen Lau1,2, Charles Henry Cunningham1,2
1Imaging Research, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada; 2Dept. of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Detection of prosthetic joint infection is done with radionuclide imaging and cannot be done with conventional MR because of signal dephasing in the magnetic field of the metallic implant. We show that T1 measurements using off-resonance excitation and defocusing can be made close to the implant and has the potential to detect T1 changes in tissue from prosthetic joint infection. The T1 shortening caused by 2 mm-thick CuSO4-doped agar layers on the implant was measured at the off-resonance frequencies 2000 Hz above and 1500 Hz below the resonance frequency of water in 500 Hz steps.