Assessment of Interscanner and Intravendor Variability of T2 Relaxation Times of Cartilage in Human Tibia at 1.5T and 3T.

Yuko Fukuda^1,2, Annie Horng¹, Jose Raya³, Juergen Weber³, Reiichi Ishikura, Shozo Hirota, Maximilian F. Reiser¹, Christian Glaser¹

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of scanners and magnetic fields (1.5T and 3T) on global and regional T2 relaxation time of the tibial cartilage. Eight healthy volunteers were examined in 3 different 1.5T scanners and one 3T scanner (same manufacturer) using a coronal 3D-T1-w-FLASH-WE sequence and a fat-saturated multislice-multiecho-sequence (MSME). The results suggests T2 variability between 1.5T and 3T scanner were markedly larger as expected due to the field strength effect on T2 relaxation time. Therefore, ideally, only one scanner type should be used in studies of cartilage T2 in OA.