Abstract #1501

Bjarnason T

Effects of diffusion weighting when using a piecewise-continuous echo spacing to measure T2 relaxation were explored. Traditional multi-echo acquisitions acquire 32-echoes equally spaced collecting out to 320ms. Potentially prolonged T2 components of the order 500ms are undersampled. A piecewise-continuous echo spacing allows one to collect out to 1120ms, thus better sampling relaxation data that could potentially contain a prolonged component. Three cases were studied: crusher gradients, read gradients, and both together. The following simulation work confirms that prolong components measured reflect microstructure and are not an artifact of the acquisition scheme.