Clinical Application to Bone Health Assessment of a New MR-Based Technique Enabling Quantitative Measurement of Trabecular Bone Structure

Juliet Compston¹, Amanda Cox², Michael Stone³, Jane Turton³, Irene Debiram¹, Kristin James²

A new magnetic resonance-based technique, designed to measure biologic texture too fine to be resolved by conventional MR imaging, was evaluated for its ability to assess bone health through quantification of trabecular bone structure in the L1 vertebrae of post-menopausal women. The technique provides a measure of the characteristic distance between trabecular elements by signal analysis of a finely sampled one-dimensional, spatially encoded echo from a selectively excited internal volume. In this study we were able to separate a cohort of healthy women from a group comprised of osteopenic and osteoporotic women with 85% certainty.