Abstract #1251

Siepmann D, Reeder S, McGovern J, Brittain J, Gold G

Traditionally, the gold standard for knee cartilage evaluation has been 3D SPGR with fat saturation. The IDEAL method (Iterative Decomposition of water and fat with Echo Asymmetry and Least-squares estimation) provides robust fat/water separation with greater SNR efficiency than fat saturation. This work combines IDEAL with parallel imaging at 3.0T to provide high resolution, high SNR cartilage imaging within five minutes. IDEAL demonstrated 31% higher patellar cartilage SNR (p<0.05) when compared to FS-SPGR with the same resolution and imaging time. Cartilage/Fluid contrast-to-noise resolution was 168% higher (p<0.05) for IDEAL-SPGR than for FS-SPGR.