Bi-Component Analysis of UTE Images: A Feasibility Study

Jiang Du¹, Eric Diaz¹, Michael Carl², Won Bae¹, Christine Chung¹, Graeme Bydder¹

Biological tissues commonly contain distinct water compartments and display multiple T2 relaxation behavior. Current standard techniques are based on multi-component fitting of multiple spin-echo images acquired with CPMG sequences. There are a group of tissues such as menisci, ligaments, tendons and cortical bone which show little or no signal with clinical CPMG or gradient echo sequences. Both free water and water bound to the collagen fibers are typically invisible. Here we propose a bi-component T2* analysis of images acquired with an ultrashort TE (UTE) sequence with a minimum TE of 8 us to quantify the free and bound water components.