At 3 T, the effective wavelength of the RF field is comparable to the dimension of the human body, resulting in B1 standing wave effects and extra variations in phase. This effect is accompanied by an increase in B0 field inhomogeneity compared to 1.5 T. This combination results in nonuniform magnetization preparation by the composite MLEV weighted T2 preparation (T2 Prep) sequence used for cor...

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has strong potential as a diagnostic for early cartilage damage, with clinical impact for diseases such as osteoarthritis. However, in vivo DWI of cartilage has proven difficult with conventional methods due to the short T2. This work presents a 3D steady-state DWI sequence that is able to image short-T2 species with high SNR. When combined with 2D navigator cor...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to compare breath-hold three-dimensional (3D) rapid gradient-echo (GRE) MR imaging obtained before and after gadolinium chelate injection with T2-weighted fast spin-echo and T2-weighted breath-hold fast spin-echo (BHFSE) MR imaging in the detection of focal hepatic masses. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Fifty-three patients with 108 focal hepatic masses had, pros...

BACKGROUND Myocardial fibrosis is a common hallmark of many diseases of the heart. Late gadolinium enhanced MRI is a powerful tool to image replacement fibrosis after myocardial infarction (MI). Interstitial fibrosis can be assessed indirectly from an extracellular volume fraction measurement using contrast-enhanced T1 mapping. Detection of short T2* species resulting from fibrotic tissue may p...

BACKGROUND Measurement of myocardial T2* is becoming widely used in the assessment of patients at risk for cardiac iron overload. The conventional breath-hold, ECG-triggered, segmented, multi-echo gradient echo (MGRE) sequence used for myocardial T2* quantification is very sensitive to respiratory motion and may not be feasible in patients who are unable to breath-hold. We propose a free-breath...

Fig. 2. A MRI revealed a lymphoedema of the neck and mediastinum (arrow) (A, STIR image) that spontaneously disappeared in a few days. A MRI performed after a week was completely normal (B, T2-weighted image). The patient was conservatively treated. A physiotherapy program was started and she was encouraged to sleep with arms by the side. At the time of writing, 1 year after the event, the pati...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The T2-weighted gradient-echo (GRE) imaging is currently the gold standard MR imaging sequence for the evaluation of patients with cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM) lesions. We aimed to compare the sensitivity of susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) with T2-weighted fast spin-echo (FSE) and GRE imaging in assigning the number of CCM lesions in patients with the famil...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE In cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT), the sensitivity of conventional MRI sequences to detect clot in the sinuses or veins is incomplete and largely depends on the time elapsed since thrombus formation. Little is known concerning the corresponding diagnostic value of fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), echo-planar T2* susceptibility-weighted imaging (T2*SW) or dif...