Characterization of Small Liver Lesions Using Partial Volume Corrected T2 Estimates Obtained from Highly Undersampled Radial Fast Spin Echo Data Via PURIFY

Chuan Huang¹, Jean-Philipper Galons², Maria I. Altbach²

T2 estimation has proven to be a valuable tool in the characterization of liver lesions. Because of the partial volume effect, it is particularly challenging to obtain T2 values of lesions with diameters smaller than 15 mm. In this work we present a joint bi-exponential fitting (JBF) algorithm combined with a principal component based reconstruction algorithm to obtain accurate T2 estimates with partial volume correction. The method, which utilizes highly undersampled radial data acquired in a single breath hold, is demonstrated in phantoms and in vivo.