Abstract #2770

Imaging of Short T2 and Ultra-Short T2 Tissues Using R2* Map

Weitian Chen¹, Huanzhou Yu¹, Atsushi Takahashi¹, Anja Brau¹, Jeffrey Stainsby², Ann Shimakawa¹, Brian A. Hargreaves³, Garry E. Gold³

¹Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; ²Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Toronto, Canada; ³Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Ultrashort echo time (UTE) imaging techniques have potential clinical applications for imaging of short T2 species. To increase contrast of short T2 species, it is usually necessary to suppress signal from long T2 tissues. Two common methods used to suppress long T2 tissues are RF pulse preparation and image subtraction. In this work, we investigated imaging of short T2 species using a R2* map, which creates image contrast between long and short T2 species different to that provided by current long T2 suppression methods. We demonstrated our methods with both Cartesian and radial acquisition.