Purpose: To develop a novel pulse sequence called spinlocked echo planar imaging (EPI), or (SLEPI), to perform rapid T 1 -weighted MRI.
Materials and Methods:SLEPI images were used to calculate T 1 maps in two healthy volunteers imaged on a 1.5-T Sonata Siemens MRI scanner. The head and extremity coils were used for imaging the brain and blood in the popliteal artery, respectively.Results: SLEPI-measured T 1 was 83 msec and 103 msec in white (WM) and gray matter (GM), respectively, 584 msec in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and was similar to values obtained with the less time-efficient sequence based on a turbo spin-echo readout. T 1 was 183 msec in arterial blood at a spin-lock (SL) amplitude of 500 Hz.
Conclusion:We demonstrate the feasibility of the SLEPI pulse sequence to perform rapid T 1 MRI. The sequence produced images of higher quality than a gradient-echo EPI sequence for the same contrast evolution times. We also discuss applications and limitations of the pulse sequence. T 1⌹ OR "SPIN-LOCKED" MRI produces contrast unlike conventional T 1 -or T 2 -weighted images. Spin-locking is achieved by the application of a low power on-resonance radiofrequency (RF) pulse to the magnetization in the transverse plane. The resulting MR signal decays with a time constant T 1 and is dominated by processes that occur with a correlation time, c , that is related to the amplitude of the spin-lock (SL) pulse (␥B 1 /2 ), which typically ranges from zero to a few kilohertz. T 1 is commonly referred to as the longitudinal relaxation time constant in the rotating frame. In biological tissues, T 1 increases with higher B 1 and approaches T 2 , the spin-spin relaxation time constant, as the amplitude of the SL pulse is reduced to zero. The sensitivity of T 1 to low-frequency interactions facilitates the study of biological tissues in a manner that is unattainable by conventional T 1 -and T 2 -based MR methods. Consequently, T 1 MRI has been used to investigate a variety of tissues such as breast, brain, and cartilage (1-3).Recently, T 1 imaging has been employed to measure blood flow and oxygen metabolism and the effect of tracers such as H 2 17 O (4,5). These studies were performed using standard spin-echo, turbo (fast) spinecho, or gradient-echo-based pulse sequences. There is substantial evidence demonstrating that the T 1 relaxation time parameter is sensitive to the early detection of cerebral ischemia (6 -8). Kettunen et al (9) revealed a linear dependence of T 1 as a function of oxygen saturation in experiments performed in vitro. Dynamic studies such as these and others that involve imaging of flowing spins such as that of blood would benefit from a fast T 1 imaging technique that is able to acquire images in the order of tens of milliseconds.A method of rapid image acquisition is the echo planar imaging (EPI) technique (10,11). In its conventional form, the EPI pulse sequence consists of an excitation pulse that is followed by a train of gradientechoes within a single pulse repetition time (TR), and is capable of generat...