Peter Wright1, Richard Hodgson2,
1LMBRU, Leeds Teaching Hospitals
NHS Trust, Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom; 2LMBRU, University of
Leeds, United Kingdom; 3Siemens AG, Erlangen, Germany; 4University
of Oxford, United Kingdom
The Achilles tendon is commonly involved in degenerative and inflammatory tendinopathies. The aim was to compare T1 measurements in healthy human Achilles tendon using a saturation recovery (SR-) UTE and variable flip angle (VFA-) UTE sequence, which were initially corroborated in phantoms with an assumed gold standard inversion recovery spin echo (IR-SE) sequence. Phantom results showed good comparison between IR-SE and SR-UTE sequences (r2 = 0.9985 [p<0.02]) and IR-SE and VFA-UTE sequences (r2 = 0.9993 [p<0.01]). Healthy volunteer T1 measurements in the Achilles tendon were 725 42 ms and 698 54 ms for SR- and VFA-UTE sequences respectively.