Adiabatic pulses have advantageous properties, such as an independently scalable bandwidth, which makes them more clinically versatile compared to standard soft pulses. However, their application to white matter has produced some unvalidated assumptions about the subsequent relaxation mechanisms. We examined the form of the longitudinal relaxation following adiabatic inversion in-vivo with simple inversion recovery experiments, which we found to be biexponential in character. This arises from cross-relaxation/exchange between aqueous and non-aqueous tissue components prepared in different magnetization states. We suggest a straightforward and accessible scheme for reproducible measurements of monoexponential T1 using a specific saturation recovery method.
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