Rebecca E. Feldman1, Christian Beaulieu1
1Biomedical Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Although sodium MRI is a promising technique for assessing knee cartilage health, the presence of fluid in the joint can confound the evaluation of cartilage. Fluid suppression can isolate cartilage signal, but a hard inversion pulse will drastically attenuate the SNR in the image, and make the received signal highly T1 dependant. This abstract shows that a long inversion pulse can improve signal intensity values in fluid suppressed sodium images. The soft inversion sequence produce better in-vivo cartilage SNR than a hard inversion sequence (SNR = 21 vs. 12) acquired in a similar time frame (~10 min).
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