Andreas Petrovic1, 2, Kathrin Ogris, Eva Hassler, 3, Rudolf Stollberger, Eva Scheurer, 3
1Institute of Medical Engineering, University of Technology Graz, Graz, Austria, Austria; 2Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Clinical Forensic Imaging, Graz, Austria, Austria; 3Medical University Graz
In legal medicine the detection of hematomas in subcutaneous fatty tissue and especially the estimation of their age is highly relevant. The time dependent development of the MRI signal of blood is well known and described in the literature for intracranial hematomas for which a semi-quantitative staging scheme was defined. In this work we continuously measured the relaxation times T1, T2 and T2* of human blood samples to characterize the actual time course. Our measurements confirm the findings from the literature but also further provide valuable insight on the interdependence of the relaxation parameters.