Ece Ercan1,
Peter Brnert2, Maarten J. Versluis1, Tom Geraedts3,
Andrew Webb1, Itamar Ronen1
1C.J.
Gorter Center for High Field MRI, Department of Radiology, Leiden University
Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands; 2Philips Research Laboratory,
Hamburg, Germany; 3Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherlands
Ultrashort echo time (UTE) imaging is recently suggested as a potential method to probe the signal from myelin. In this study, we investigate the challenges in UTE relaxometry of the human brain through phantom experiments and UTE acquisitions from the brain white matter. We suggest an improved long T2 suppression scheme for such experiments. We report the non-exponential behavior that we observed in the relaxometric data from the phantom with a T2* value of 30 ms as well as in the data from human brain, which is possibly caused by non-fully suppressed tissue constituents with a T2* value of 10-30 ms (such as myelin water).