Christian Graff1, Kenneth L. Weiss2, Eric W. Clarkson3, Maria I. Altbach3
1Program in Applied Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; 2Department of Radiology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA; 3Department of Radiology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Bone marrow is a challenging region of the body for MR imaging due to the presence of two chemical species, both fatty yellow bone marrow and red bone marrow, as well as micro-trabeculae which cause significant intra-voxel de-phasing (characterized by the time constant T2). In this work we present a novel iterative algorithm which simultaneously provides estimates of T2 to evaluate the bone architecture, as well as an estimate of the relative lipid concentration and T2 of the water component for the characterization of lesions using data acquired with the GRASE technique.