Takatoshi Aoki1, Yoshiko Yamashita1,
Hiroyuki Takahashi1, Yoshiko Hayashida1, Hodaka Oki1,
Shigeru Hibino2, Atsushi Nozaki2, Kazuyoshi Saito3,
Yoshiya Tanaka3, Yukunori Korogi1
1Department of Radiology, University
of Occupational & Environmental Health School of Medicine, Kitakyushu,
Fukuoka, Japan; 2GE Healthcare Japan; 3First department
of Internal Medicine, University of Occupational and Environmental Health
School of, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan
A main challenge of clinical musculoskeletal imaging with maintaining high SNR is uniform fat suppression in areas of B0 inhomogeneity. Our purpose is to compare IDEAL with chemical shift selective fat-suppressed T1-weighted spin-echo (FS-CHESS-T1-SE) images for MR imaging of the hand and finger at 3.0T MR system. Eight healthy volunteers and 8 rheumatoid arthritis patients were examined with both sequences. Image quality and lesion delineation was better on IDEAL than on FS-CHESS-T1-SE images. IDEAL compensates for the effects of field inhomogeneities, providing uniform fat suppression of the hand and finger than did FS-CHESS-T1-SE sequence.