Ultrashort TE 3D Gradient-Echo Imaging of Human Knee at 3T

Jang-Yeon Park¹, Ute Goerke¹, Steen Moeller¹, Eddie Auerbach¹, Jutta Ellermann¹, Michael Garwood¹

Although UTE and SWIFT have the advantage in imaging ultrashort T2 species, it can be challenging to implement them on clinical scanners due to high technical demands. Recently, we proposed a new ultrashort TE 3D gradient-echo imaging that can effectively cover TE range of > ~0.2 ms, which was dubbed SWIFT-LiTE. It is renamed here UTE-GRE to emphasize that a conventional selective pulse like a sinc pulse can also be used for excitation. UTE-GRE was implemented on clinical 3T and human knee data were acquired focusing on menisci. White and red zones were differentiated without contrast agent or image subtraction.