Recently, there has been a growing interest in assessing lesions in the deep layers of knee cartilage as a pathogenesis of osteoarthritis. Ultrashort echo-time (UTE) T2* mapping in the deep layers has demonstrated great potential to detect early degenerative changes. Fat suppression is normally accompanied to reduce off-resonance artifacts from adjacent fatty tissues; however, it can also suppress significant amount of short T2 tissues and affect quantification. In this work, we quantified cartilage T2* by decomposing fat and water components using no fat-suppressed 3D multi-echo UTE images and demonstrated shorter T2* compared to that from fat-suppressed 3D UTE images.
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