T2-Weighted Liver MRI at 3T Using a BLADE Technique: Comparison with a Standard Rectilinear T2-Weighted Sequence for Image Quality and Lesion Detection

Andrew B. Rosenkrantz¹, Lorenzo Mannelli¹, David Mossa¹, James Babb¹

T2WI of the liver was performed in 28 patients at 3T using standard rectilinear and BLADE k-space trajectories. Compared with standard T2WI, BLADE demonstrated significant improvements in in-plane motion, other ghosting artifact, liver edge sharpness, vessel sharpness, and flow suppression, a trend toward improved B1-inhomogeneity artifact, and no difference in through-plane motion. BLADE demonstrated a significant improvement in specificity for liver lesion detection but no difference in sensitivity. ROI analysis showed significantly improved relative contrast between the liver and focal lesions with BLADE. We conclude that BLADE achieved significant improvements in artifacts, image quality, and specificity for liver lesion detection.