A 4-minute solution for submillimeter whole-brain T 1ρ quantification

To develop a robust, accurate, and accelerated T quantification solution for submillimeter in vivo whole-brain imaging. A multislice T mapping solution (MS-T ) was developed based on a two-acquisition scheme using turbo spin echo with RF cycling to allow for whole-brain coverage with 0.8-mm in-plane resolution. A compressed sensing-based fast imaging method, SCOPE, was used to accelerate the MS-T acquisition time to a total scan time of 3 minutes 31 seconds. A phantom experiment was conducted to assess the accuracy of MS-T by comparing the T value obtained using MS-T with the reference value obtained using the standard single-slice T mapping method. In vivo scans of 13 volunteers were acquired prospectively to validate the robustness of MS-T . In the phantom study, the T values obtained with MS-T were in good agreement with the reference T values (R = 0.9991) and showed high consistency throughout all slices (coefficient of variation = 2.2 ± 2.43%). In the in vivo experiments, T maps were successfully acquired for all volunteers with no visually noticeable artifacts. There was no significant difference in T values between MS-T acquisitions and fully sampled acquisitions for all brain tissues (p-value > .05). In the intraclass correlation coefficient and Bland-Altman analyses, the accelerated T measurements show moderate to good agreement to the fully sampled reference values. The proposed MS-T solution allows for high-resolution whole-brain T mapping within 4 minutes and may provide a potential tool for investigating neural diseases.