Misung
Han1, Ko Chiba1, 2, Suchandrima Banerjee3,
Roland Krug1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California - San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; 2Orthopaedic Surgery, Nagasaki University School of Medicine, Nagasaki, Japan; 3GE Healthcare, Applied Science Lab, Menlo Park, CA, United States
High-resolution imaging of the central body regions is usually hampered by long scan time in order to acquire the complete data without aliasing. High-resolution trabecular bone MRI allows assessment of trabecular bone structure in the context of osteoporosis in vivo, but the application to the proximal femur has been limited due to its deep-seated location. In this work, we propose a high-resolution imaging technique by combining variable flip-angle 3D fast spin-echo sequence and outer volume suppression at 3T. Ex-vivo and in-vivo experiments demonstrate that our technique can depict trabecular structure at the proximal femur reliably without visible aliasing artifacts.