Ke Li1, 2, Richard D. Dortch1, 2, Daniel F. Gochberg1, 2, Seth A. Smith1, 2, Bruce Damon1, 2, Jane H. Park1, 3
1Institute of Imaging Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; 2Department of Radiology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; 3Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States
The Quantitative magnetization transfer (qMT) yields parameters that describes the interactions between free and macromolecular protons in biophysical environments. A selective inversion recovery (SIR) technique was developed to determine the qMT parameters. However, the estimation of parameters based on the bi-exponential model may be biased due to the existence of a fat component. In this work, simulations were performed, by using synthesized phantom data. It was predicted that the two key parameters of interest - pm/pf and kmf, are biased with varied fat component sizes. This prediction was further verified in human muscle data with and without fat suppression pulse.
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