• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.141-155
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• 2021

Purpose: To develop a 3D magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) method for application in high resolution knee cartilage PD, T₁, T₂ mapping. Materials and Methods: A novel 3D acquisition trajectory with golden-angle rotating radial in k_xy direction and interleaved echo planar imaging (EPI) acquisition in the k_z direction was implemented in the MRF framework. A centric order was applied to the interleaved EPI acquisition to reduce Nyquist ghosting artifact due to field inhomogeneity. For the reconstruction, singular value decomposition (SVD) compression method was used to accelerate reconstruction time and conjugate gradient sensitivity-encoding (CG-SENSE) was performed to overcome low SNR of the high resolution data. Phantom experiments were performed to verify the proposed method. In vivo experiments were performed on 6 healthy volunteers and 2 early osteoarthritis (OA) patients. Results: In the phantom experiments, the T₁ and T₂ values of the proposed method were in good agreement with the spin-echo references. The results from the in vivo scans showed high quality proton density (PD), T₁, T₂ map with EPI echo train length (N_ETL = 4), acceleration factor in through plane (R_z = 5), and number of radial spokes (N_spk = 4). In patients, high T₂ values (50-60 ms) were seen in all transverse, sagittal, and coronal views and the damaged cartilage regions were in agreement with the hyper-intensity regions shown on conventional turbo spin-echo (TSE) images. Conclusion: The proposed 3D MRF method can acquire high resolution (0.5 mm³) quantitative maps in practical scan time (~ 7 min and 10 sec) with full coverage of the knee (FOV: 160 × 160 × 120 mm³).

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.1332-1340
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• 2021

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility of a new three-dimensional (3D) MR fingerprinting (MRF) technique for the prostate gland by conducting phantom and clinical studies. Materials and Methods: The new 3D MRF technique used in this study enables quick data acquisition and has a high resolution. For the phantom study, the MRF T1 and T2 values in an in-house phantom were compared with those of goldstandard mapping methods using linear regression analysis. For the clinical study, we evaluated 90 patients who underwent prostate imaging with MRF for suspected prostate cancer between September 2019 and February 2020. The mean T1 and T2 values were compared in the peripheral zone, transition zone, and focal lesions using paired t tests. The differences in the T1 and T2 values according to cancer aggressiveness were evaluated using one-way analysis of variance. Results: In the phantom study, the MRF T1 and T2 values showed a perfect correlation with the gold-standard T1 and T2 values (R > 0.99). In the clinical study, the T1 and T2 values in the peripheral zone were significantly higher than those in the transitional zone (p < 0.001, both). The T1 and T2 values in prostate cancer were significantly lower than those in the peripheral and transitional zones. The higher the grade of cancer, the lower the T2 values. Conclusion: The T1 and T2 values obtained from the 3D MRF showed a perfect correlation with the gold standard values in the phantom study. Differences in the T1 and T2 values among the different zones of the prostate gland were identified using 3D MRF in patients.