Michael J. Wald1, Jeremy F. Magland1, Yusuf Bhagat1, Hee Kwon Song1, Felix W. Wehrli1
1Laboratory for Structural NMR Imaging, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA
The sensitivity to changes in trabecular bone microstructure is limited by SNR. Since TB aligns preferentially along the direction of loading (z-axis), a larger voxel width along that direction can be tolerated. Nevertheless, an increase in resolution along z-direction is likely to improve the accuracy of the structural analysis but is hampered by the achievable SNR. Here, the reproducibility of trabecular bone structural parameters is examined for two high resolution acquisitions to determine the potential for isotropic imaging using a 160μm voxel size at 3T. Potential sources of error are minimized and good reproducibility is achieved. The potential improvement in accuracy afforded by the isotropic voxel size comes with a slight reduction in reproducibility relative to the anisotropic acquisition.