Jonathan Tamir1,2,3, Ken-Pin Hwang4, Naoyuki Takei5, and Suchandrima Banerjee6
1Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States, 2Diagnostic Medicine, Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States, 3Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Austin, TX, United States, 4Imaging Physics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States, 5MR Applications and Workflow, GE Healthcare, Hino, Tokyo, Japan, 6MR Applications and Workflow, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States
1Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States, 2Diagnostic Medicine, Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States, 3Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Austin, TX, United States, 4Imaging Physics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States, 5MR Applications and Workflow, GE Healthcare, Hino, Tokyo, Japan, 6MR Applications and Workflow, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States
We propose a 3D shuffled multi-contrast acquisition combining multi-echo spin-echo and inversion-recovery spoiled gradient echo. As the acquisition is sensitive to T1 and T2, multi-contrast and quantitative images can be recovered from a single scan.
Figure 1. EPG Simulation and scan parameters. (a) RF flip angles (90-degree excitation not shown). (b) Transverse and longitudinal magnetization for T1=1600 ms, T2=80 ms (after arriving at a stable equilibrium magnetization). (c) Scan parameters for simulation and phantom experiments. The first acquisition block uses an FSE train with non-selective variable refocusing flip angles and a fast recovery tip-up pulse. After an adiabatic inversion pulse, a series of SPGRE blocks are played in sequence.
Figure 4. Animated gif of the reconstructed time series of images at three different slices in the ISMRM-NIST phantom, corresponding to the three plates of contrast spheres. In total, a time series of 300 images are reconstructed.
