Juliet Compston1, Amanda Cox2, Michael Stone3, Jane Turton3, Irene Debiram1, Kristin James2
1School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom; 2Acuitas Medical, Swansea, United Kingdom; 3Llandough Hospital, Cardiff, United Kingdom
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.