Compressed Sensing 3D Ultrashort Echo Time (COMPUTE) Imaging

Cheng Li¹, Jeremy Magland¹, Felix Wehrli¹

Ultra-short echo time (UTE) imaging is a technique for directly imaging tissues with sub-millisecond T2 values. However, 2D UTE imaging is inherently time-inefficient because of half-pulse excitation and radial center-out sampling. In this work we describe 3D Compressed Sensing UTE (COMPUTE) imaging with a hybrid-radial encoding strategy to improve efficiency. Phantom and in vivo results demonstrate the feasibility of COMPUTE technique with an acceleration factor of 10. In work in progress, long-T2 suppression modules are being incorporated into COMPUTE, allowing spatial sparsity of the soft-tissue suppressed images to be exploited to achieve even higher acceleration factors.