Kang Wang1, Huanzhou Yu2, Jean
Brittain3, Scott Reeder, 1,4, Jiang Du5
1Medical Physics, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; 2Applied Science
Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; 3Applied
Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Madison, WI, United States; 4Radiology,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; 5Radiology,
University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, United States
An
ultrashort TE (UTE) imaging technique has been developed for the
visualization of tissues with short T2 or T2*, such as menisci and tendons.
UTE methods typically utilize fat suppression to improve the contrast for
tissues with short T2. However, conventional fat-saturation methods achieve
limited success due to the broad short T2* water-peak and the complexity of
the fat spectrum. In this work, we have combined a 2D multi-slice multi-echo
UTE sequence with a water/fat separation technique (IDEAL), to obtain high
contrast short T2 images without the use of any preparation pulse and within
acceptable scan times.