Time Efficient 3D Radial UTE Sampling with Fully Automatic Delay Compensation on a Clinical 3T MR Scanner

This work's aim was to minimize the acquisition time of a radial 3D ultra-short echo-time (UTE) sequence and to provide fully automated, gradient delay compensated, and therefore artifact free, reconstruction. The radial 3D UTE sequence (echo time 60 mu s) was implemented as single echo acquisition with center-out readouts and improved time efficient spoiling on a clinical 3T scanner without hardware modifications. To assess the sequence parameter dependent gradient delays each acquisition contained a quick calibration scan and utilized the phase of the readouts to detect the actual k-space center. This calibration scan does not require any user interaction. To evaluate the robustness of this automatic delay estimation phantom experiments were performed and 19 in vivo imaging data of the head, tibial cortical bone, feet and lung were acquired from 6 volunteers. As clinical application of this fast 3D UTE acquisition single breath-hold lung imaging is demonstrated. The proposed sequence allowed very short repetition times (TR similar to 1ms), thus reducing total acquisition time. The proposed, fully automated k-phase based gradient delay calibration resulted in accurate delay estimations (difference to manually determined optimal delay -0.13 +/- 0.45 mu s) and allowed unsupervised reconstruction of high quality images for both phantom and in vivo data. The employed fast spoiling scheme efficiently suppressed artifacts caused by incorrectly refocused echoes. The sequence proved to be quite insensitive to motion, flow and susceptibility artifacts and provides oversampling protection against aliasing foldovers in all directions. Due to the short TR, acquisition times are attractive for a wide range of clinical applications. For short T2* mapping this sequence provides free choice of the second TE, usually within less scan time as a comparable dual echo UTE sequence.