Effect of multislice acquisition on T1 and T2 measurements of articular cartilage at 3T

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of magnetization transfer on multislice T-1 and T-2 measurements of articular cartilage. Materials and Methods: A set of phantoms with different concentrations of collagen and contrast agent (Gd DTPA(2-)) were used for the in vitro study. A total of 20 healthy knees were used for the in vivo study T-1 and T-2 measurements were performed using fast-spin-echo inversion recovery (FSE-IR) sequence and multi-spin-echo (MSE) sequence, respectively, in both in vitro and in vivo studies. We investigated the difference in T-1 and T-2 values between that measured by single-slice acquisition and that measured by multislice acquisition. Results: Regarding T-1 measurement, a large drop of T-1 in all slices and also a large interslice variation in T-1 were observed when multislice acquisition was used. Regarding T-2 measurement, a substantial drop of T-2 in all slices was observed; however, there was no apparent interslice variation when multislice acquisition was used. Conclusion: This study demonstrated that the adaptation of multislice acquisition technique for T-1 measurement using FSE-IR methodology is difficult and its use for clinical evaluation is problematic. In contrast, multislice acquisition for T-2 measurement using MSE was clinically applicable if inaccuracies caused by multislice acquisition were taken into account.