Jung-Jiin Hsu1, Gary H. Glover2,
Greg Zaharchuk2
1Department of Radiology, University of
Miami School of Medicine, Miami, FL, United States; 2Lucas Center
for Imaging, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
Saturation-recovery
(SR) method is a popular technique for the longitudinal relaxation rate
measurement, in which the relaxation rate is derived from separate
measurements of at least two different recovery times. An interesting and long-standing question
in clinical applications is, given a limited amount of time, how the recovery
times should be allocated to minimize the uncertainty of the measurement. In this work, a systematic Monte Carlo
computation for the SR method is carried out and general formulas are derived
to answer this question.