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- Title
Ultrashort Echo Time and Fast Field Echo Imaging for Spine Bone Imaging with Application in Spondylolysis Evaluation.
- Authors
Vucevic, Diana; Malis, Vadim; Yamashita, Yuichi; Mesa, Anya; Yamaguchi, Tomosuke; Achar, Suraj; Miyazaki, Mitsue; Bae, Won C.
- Abstract
Isthmic spondylolysis is characterized by a stress injury to the pars interarticularis bones of the lumbar spines and is often missed by conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), necessitating a computed tomography (CT) for accurate diagnosis. We compare MRI techniques suitable for producing CT-like images. Lumbar spines of asymptomatic and low back pain (LBP) subjects were imaged at 3-Tesla with multi-echo ultrashort echo time (UTE) and field echo (FE) sequences followed by simple post-processing of averaging and inverting to depict spinal bones with a CT-like appearance. The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for bone was determined to compare UTE vs. FE and single-echo vs. multi-echo data. Visually, both sequences depicted cortical bone with good contrast; UTE-processed sequences provided a flatter contrast for soft tissues that made them easy to distinguish from bone, while FE-processed images had better resolution and bone–muscle contrast, which are important for fracture detection. Additionally, multi-echo images provided significantly (p = 0.03) greater CNR compared with single-echo images. Using these techniques, progressive spondylolysis was detected in an LBP subject. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using spine bone MRI to yield CT-like contrast. Through the employment of multi-echo UTE and FE sequences combined with simple processing, we observe sufficient enhancements in image quality and contrast to detect pars fractures.
- Subjects
LUMBAR pain; MAGNETIC resonance imaging; COMPACT bone; COMPUTED tomography; IMAGE intensifiers
- Publication
Computation, 2024, Vol 12, Issue 8, p152
- ISSN
2079-3197
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3390/computation12080152