Ananth J. Madhuranthakam1, Subhendra N.
Sarkar2,3, Reed F. Busse4, David C. Alsop2,3
1MR Applied Science Lab, GE Healthcare,
Boston, MA, United States; 2Radiology, Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States; 3Harvard Medical
School, Boston, MA, United States; 4MR Applied Science Lab, GE
Healthcare, Madison, WI, United States
FLAIR
is widely used for its improved conspicuity of long T2
lesions. However, concerns remain that
the IR imparts T1 weighting that can decrease detectability of
some lesions. Frequently, both T2
and FLAIR are used in clinical protocols to guard against these
concerns. Recently, double IR (DIR)
has been proposed to highlight some brain lesions by nulling both WM and CSF
but produces even stronger T1 contrast than FLAIR. Here, we describe an optimization with DIR
to produce an image with pure T2 weighting while simultaneously
suppressing CSF and demonstrate results in normal volunteers with a single
slab 3D acquisition.