Lauren
M. Shapiro1, Bragi Sveinsson1, 2, Marcus T.
Alley1, Brian A. Hargreaves1, Garry E. Gold1,
3
1Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 2Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 3Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
Change in T2 relaxation time in muscle is an indication of muscle activity. Unfortunately, two-dimensional spin echo techniques to acquire T2 maps suffer from long acquisition times, blurring, artifacts and limited coverage. We evaluate the effect of exercise upon muscle T2 using a recently validated 3D quantitative DESS (qDESS) sequence in entire muscles at 3.0T. We compare T2 values in the medial and lateral gastrocnemius and tibialis anterior in 8 volunteers before exercise and at three points post-exercise. T2 values in all muscles peaked immediately post-exercise, and significant T2 differences between exercised and non-exercised legs were seen.