Measurements of the apparent alveolar septal wall thickness (SWT) with hyperpolarized xenon-129 (HXe) MRI are sensitive to inflammatory or fibrotic pathologies in the lung parenchyma but are also affected by lung inflation level. Here, we investigated the dependence of such measurements on the choice of acquisition parameters in a rabbit model. We found the SWT measurements to be strongly affected by the imaging parameters: in particular, the number and flip angle of the applied RF pulses centered at the dissolved-phase resonances. If this bias is minimized, the previously reported dependence of septal thickness measurements on lung inflation disappears.
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