Noriyuki Tawara1, Osamu Nitta2, Hironobu Kuruma2, Mamoru Niitsu3, Atsuto Hoshikawa1, Toru Okuwaki1, Akiyoshi Itoh4
1Department of Sports Medicine, Japan Institute of Sports Sciences, Tokyo, Japan; 2Department of Physical Therapy, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan; 3Department of Radiological Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan; 4NIHON University, Chiba, Japan
Exercise induced Muscle activity is essential in sports medicine and rehabilitation medicine, especially the trunk muscle. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can evaluate activity of the muscle; transverse relaxation time (T2) of exercised muscle increases compared to that of the rest muscle. The previous studies proposed the muscle functional magnetic resonance imaging (mfMRI) which visualized muscle activity with enhanced activated muscle. However, for calculating T2, the mfMRI using the spin echo (SE) sequence requires minutes of the acquisition time. And the body parts of the mfMRI were limited to the limbs. We proposed and verified the feasibility of mfMRI using ultrafast imaging (fast-acquired mfMRI: fast-mfMRI). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the trunk muscle activity using fast-mfMRI.In this study, we presented the fast-mfMRI demonstrating the functional information with detailed morphologies. One of the advantages of the fast-mfMRI is rapid scan time advantageous for the human trunk imaging.