Hamidreza Saligheh Rad1, Shing Chun Benny
Lam1, James Love1, Jeremy F. Magland1, Felix
W. Wehrli1
1Laboratory for Structural NMR Imaging,
Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania Health System,
Philadelphia, PA, United States
The
impaired strength of osteoporotic cortical bone is largely a consequence of
increased porosity, which manifests in increased bone water fraction. Hence,
knowledge of bone water (BW) content would provide an indirect measure of
pore volume fraction. Surface interactions in the tight spaces of the
lacuno-canalicular system shorten the lifetime of the BW proton signal to
less than 1msec, therefore requiring solid-state imaging techniques for its
capture and detection. In this work, we developed new ultra-short echo-time
(UTE) radial imaging acquisition and processing capabilities for precise
quantification of BW in cortical bone.