Abstract #2505

Quantitative Water Content Assessment Using a Single-Scan Multi-Parameter Mapping Technique and Spectral Processing of a Multiple Gradient Echo Acquisition

Ken-Pin Hwang¹, Marcel Warntjes², R. Jason Stafford³, Wolfgang Stefan³, Edward F. Jackson³, John E. Madewell⁴, John D. Hazle³, Zachary W. Slavens⁵, Tzehping L. Chi⁴

¹Global Applied Science Laboratory, General Electric Healthcare, Houston, TX, United States; ²Center for Medical Imaging Science and Visualisation, Linkping University, Linkping, Sweden; ³Department of Imaging Physics, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States; ⁴Department of Radiology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States; ⁵MR Engineering, General Electric Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, United States

Brain water content may be assessed with a proton density measurement as derived from a multiple gradient echo sequence, where all causes of signal inhomogeneity are properly corrected. Typically, the effective flip angle of the transmit field and T1 of tissues are mapped with multiple dedicated sequences. Here, we base our corrections on parameters produced from a single multi-parameter mapping technique. We also extrapolate the gradient echo signal using a spectral modeling technique instead of fitting the signal magnitudes. Thus absolute water content assessment is performed with two complementary sequences which provide other quantitative measurements as well.