Weitian Chen1, Huanzhou Yu1, Atsushi Takahashi1, Anja Brau1, Jeffrey Stainsby2, Ann Shimakawa1, Brian A. Hargreaves3, Garry E. Gold3
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Toronto, Canada; 3Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Ultrashort echo time (UTE) imaging techniques have potential clinical applications for imaging of short T2 species. To increase contrast of short T2 species, it is usually necessary to suppress signal from long T2 tissues. Two common methods used to suppress long T2 tissues are RF pulse preparation and image subtraction. In this work, we investigated imaging of short T2 species using a R2* map, which creates image contrast between long and short T2 species different to that provided by current long T2 suppression methods. We demonstrated our methods with both Cartesian and radial acquisition.