Complete T1, T2* and Proton-Density Maps of Bone and Soft Tissues from UTE and Standard FLASH

Jean-David Jutras¹, Keith Wachowicz¹, ², B. Gino Fallone¹, ², Nicola DeZanche¹, ²

Achieving bone and soft-tissue contrast simultaneously is challenging. The traditional solution consists of co-registering a MRI dataset with a CT dataset; the MRI provides the soft-tissue contrast with high SNR, while CT yields the bone structural information. In this work, a combination of two similar MRI datasets is proposed: quantitative FLASH UTE and Standard FLASH. Bone T1, T2* and proton-density are segmented from the UTE datasets and combined with the standard datasets to form complete quantitative maps. The technique has the advantage of providing the same quantitative information in all tissue types, with three different contrast mechanisms.