Shuo Zhang1,
Martin Uecker2, Jens Frahm1
1Biomedizinische
NMR Forschungs GmbH am Max-Planck-Institut fuer biophysikalische Chemie,
Goettingen, Niedersachsen, Germany; 2Dept. of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA,
United States
Previous MRI studies of quantitative T1 mapping are limited mainly by a long acquisition time for high resolution and sufficient spatial coverage. Here, we applied the recently introduced real-time MRI technique based on highly undersampled radial FLASH together with a single magnetization inversion pulse. Consecutive brain images with a spatial resolution of 0.5 &[mult] 0.5 &[mult] 5 mm3 covering typically 5 to 9 slices were acquired within 4 s and were reconstructed by regularized nonlinear inversion. Quantitative T1 maps were obtained through a pixel-by-pixel three parameter curve fitting, with T1 values of different tissues in good agreement with literature findings.