Ultrashort TE Spectroscopic Imaging (UTESI): An Efficient Technique For Free & Bound Water Quantification

Jiang Du¹, Eric Diaz¹, Richard Znamirowski¹, Sheronda Statum¹, Darryl DLima², Graeme Bydder¹, Christine Chung¹

It is well accepted that biological tissues commonly contain distinct water compartments and display two or more T2 components. However, conventional T2 relaxometry still focuses on single component analysis using multi-echo spin echo sequences, which typically cannot detect signal from the short T2 components in a variety of musculoskeletal (MSK) tissues. Here we propose a bi-component T2* analysis of images from ultrashort TE spectroscopic imaging (UTESI) sequence to quantify T2* and fractions of the free and bound water components in a series of MSK tissues.