Producing a Synthetic Magnetization Transfer Reference Volume with T1 Maps Acquired using a Different Pulse Sequence: Practical Considerations.

Macromolecular proton fraction (MPF) mapping can be achieved using only two acquired volumes, one with and one without a magnetization transfer (MT) pulse, in addition to T1, B1 and B0 maps. Further scan time reduction is possible if the T1 and B1 maps required for MPF computations are used to generate a synthetic reference image, eliminating the reference image acquisition. This has been shown to work when the images used to generate T1 were acquired from the same sequence and parameters as the MT. We investigate if we can use a different sequence with a calibration to achieve this.