MR imaging with UTE/ZTE sequences has attracted significant clinical interest in recent years due to their many inherent merits, such as resilience to motion and flow artifacts, capability to achieve high acceleration factors and minimize acoustic noise, as well as capability to capture signal from tissues with ultra-short T2s/T2*s. However, ZTE acquisitions and many UTE acquisitions require the use of low flip angles and, as a consequence, deliver mostly proton density weighted contrast. Magnetization preparation such as fat suppression with UTE/ZTE is time consuming as k-space center data needs to be acquired every TR. Therefore, exploiting the other inherent information such as signal phase is important. In this work, we demonstrate that phase images obtained with UTE can be exploited to enhance the tissue contrast such as fat/water differentiation and enable improved cortical bone visualization, and generate susceptibility map in the volunteer knee on a clinical scanner at 3T.
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