Modelling ultra-short TE (UTE) signal decay allows the extraction of multiple T2* components, an interesting approach to evaluate collagen-rich tissues with short T2 values. UTE can be promising to assess skeletal muscle fibrosis, whose non-invasive evaluation is still challenging. There are, though, indications that muscle T2* during ischemia can change when altering muscle orientation in the static magnetic field. Here we showed that muscle T2* at rest is indeed sensitive to muscle positioning in B0, with variable orientation-dependent changes in different muscles. We hypothesize that muscle structure might lead to orientation-dependent local susceptibility-induced B0 gradients, resulting in anisotropy of water-T2*.
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