Yusuf A. Bhagat1,
Cheng Li1, Shing Chun Benny Lam1, Alan C. Seifert1,
Mahdieh Bashoor Zadeh1, Felix W. Wehrli1
1Laboratory
for Structural NMR Imaging, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA,
United States
The pore water fraction of cortical bone water is known to increase with age. Here, 3T-based ultra-short echo-time (UTE) MRI of the mid-diaphyseal tibia was used to evaluate the potential of the suppression ratio (SR, unsuppressed to soft-tissue suppressed UTE signal) as a surrogate parameter for porosity in 39 healthy women (24-81 years) and in 13 cortical bone specimens from human donors (27-97 years). SR was strongly associated with age and correlated with micro-CT-derived porosity. SR may serve as an in vivo biomarker of porosity in lieu of more involved methods such as bi-component T2* analysis.