Abstract #2763

Region Based Joint Bi-Exponential T2 Fitting for Small Lesions

Chuan Huang¹, Christian G. Graff², Eric W. Clarkson^3,4, Ali Bilgin^5,6, Maria I. Altbach³

¹Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States; ²Division of Imaging & Applied Mathematics, Food & Drug Administration; ³Radiology, University of Arizona; ⁴Optical Sciences, University of Arizona; ⁵Biomedical Engineering, University of Arizona; ⁶Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Arizona

T2 estimation has proven to be a valuable quantitative tool for assessing a variety of pathologies. It plays a particularly important role in lesion classification. Partial volume is generally a factor in lesion T2 estimation, particularly for lesions with diameters smaller than 15 mm. In order to obtain accurate T2 estimates for lesions with partial volume, bi-exponential fitting is required. However, bi-exponential model fitting suffers from large uncertainty of the fitting parameters when noise is present.