Laurence D. Toms1, Rexford D. Newbold1,
Anil Rao1, Sam R. Miller2, Jeroen A. Tielbek1,
Mark D. Tanner1, Ros M. Gordon1, Robin K. Strachan3,
Paul M. Matthews1, Andrew P. Brown1
1GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Imaging
Centre, Imperial College, Hammersmith Hospital, London, United Kingdom; 2Discovery
Analytics, GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, United Kingdom; 3Department of
Orthopaedic Surgery, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London
Sodium
imaging in articular cartilage may be an indicator of osteoarthritis
progression. In this work we sought to assess the reproducibility of this
technique. Using a dual tuned 1H/23Na
quadrature volume coil, 3D DESS proton images and 3D-cones short echo time
sodium images were acquired in the same scan session, which was repeated for
11 subjects. DESS images were segmented, and the resulting ROIs were applied
to the co-registered sodium images. The technique showed good repeatability:
the interclass correlation coefficient for sodium was 0.88 (0.6 0.97) and
the percent coefficient of variation was 4.2% (2.9%-7.3%).