Advances in automatic segmentation of cartilage in hip joints has shown the need for high resolution and contrast in 3D sequences. In this work, double-echo steady-state (DESS) hip images from a healthy volunteer were compared at 3T and 7T. 3D-DESS with a resolution up to 0.4x0.4x0.6mm3 was acquired, and showed that the 7T images had superior anatomical detail, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast ratio (CR) and overall image quality. The improvements observed in 7T imaging of the hip have the potential to boost the performance of automated cartilage segmentation algorithms by reducing segmentation errors.
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