Quantification of bone mineral density (BMD) and/or bone fraction (BF) has long been a goal of MRI research, but thus far no method has successfully translated into clinical practice. Methods including R2* mapping, susceptibility mapping and ultrashort echo time MRI have shown promise but remain difficult to implement. A simpler approach to BMD/BF quantification is to measure the signal loss occurring in bone-containing voxels compared to the signal occurring in a bone-free voxel. We propose a method called SyNthetic Auto-interpolated in-Phase (SNAP) imaging which uses this principle and accounts for spatial variations in B1/coil sensitivity, enabling practical estimation of BMD/BF.
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