Fat-suppressed T2 mapping of human knee femoral articular cartilage: comparison with conventional T2 mapping

Abstract

Background There is paucity of studies applying fat suppressed (FS) technique to T2 mapping to overcome chemical shift artifacts. The purpose of the study is to difference between FS T2 and conventional T2 mapping and reproducibility of FS T2 mapping in the femoral articular cartilage. Methods Eighteen patients who had normal-looking femoral cartilage and underwent knee MRI with conventional T2 and FS T2 mapping were included. T2 values of each mapping were measured by two readers independently from nine regions in the medial femoral condyle (MFC) and lateral femoral condyle (LFC). Each anatomical region was divided by lines at ± 10°, 30°, 50°, 70°, 90°, and 110°. Comparisons of T2 values between conventional and FS T2 mapping were statistically analyzed. The T2 values between FS and conventional T2 mapping in the anterior, central and posterior femoral condyles were compared. Results The overall femoral condyle T2 values from the FS T2 map were significantly lower than those from the conventional T2 map (48.5ms vs. 51.0ms, p < 0.001). The differences in the T2 values between the two maps were significantly different among the three divisions of the LFC (p = 0.009) and MFC (p = 0.031). The intra-class correlation coefficients indicated higher agreement in the FS T2 map than in the conventional T2 map (0.943 vs. 0.872). Conclusions The T2 values of knee femoral cartilage are significantly lower on FS T2 mapping than on conventional T2 mapping. FS T2 mapping is a more reproducible method for evaluating knee femoral cartilage.

Improved accuracy and precision of fat-suppressed isotropic 3D T2 mapping MRI of the knee with dictionary fitting and patch-based denoising

“…In the in vivo studies, the cartilage T2 values obtained with AnT2Fit agreed well with those obtained with T2-prepared GRE in previous studies [ 9 , 10 ], although they were much lower than what is typically observed with TSE-based techniques [ 25 , 26 ]. It should be noted that reference-standard SE T2 values cannot be obtained in vivo since they typically take several hours to acquire.…”

Performance of T2 mapping in the staging of Graves’ ophthalmopathy based on different region of interest selection methods

“…T2 mapping, as a technique that can directly measure the T2 relaxation time (T2RT) of tissues and does not need to be standardized, has been primarily used in the early evaluation of cartilage degeneration and cardiomyopathy (11,12). In recent years, the T2RT of EOM derived from T2 mapping has been reported to be useful for the staging of GO (13)(14)(15).…”