Chuan Huang1, Ali Bilgin2, Christian Graff3, Maria I. Altbach4
1Dept of Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; 2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona; 3Program in Applied Mathematics, University of Arizona; 4Dept of Radiology, University of Arizona
T2 weighted MRI is used clinically for characterization of various pathologies. It has been demonstrated that quantitative methods for measuring T2 values are superior to visual evaluation. However, many of the proposed methods to measure T2 values suffer from long acquisition times, motion-induced errors, low spatial resolution and/or low number of measured points on the T2 relaxation curve, etc. To overcome the problems we proposed a model-based approach with sparsifying penalty functions for estimating T2s from radial FSE data which yields accurate T2 estimates of small lesions from highly undersampled data. This novel method has great potential for characterization of small neoplasms in the body where the acquisition time is restricted to a breath hold.