Radu Ioan Bolbos1, Daniel Kuo1, Ann Shimakawa2, Huanzhou Yu2, Michael Ries3, Sharmila Majumdar1,3, Xiaojuan Li1
1Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare ASL West, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 3Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
The trabecular bone structure, commonly reported using Fiesta-c imaging cannot be evaluated reliably within the region with Bone Marrow Edema-like Lesions (BMEL) due to presence of water which is also dark (as the bone) in these regions. The aim of this study was to employ an investigational version of IDEAL based on SPGR sequence (which provides robust fat-water separation) to quantitatively assess the trabecular structure within the BMEL region, and to validate the measurements using high-resolution peripheral quantitative CT (HR-pQCT). Within BMEL, Fiesta-c generated higher bone structure quantification compared to IDEAL, due to potential overestimations of bone.