T_1 Bias reduction in the quantification of tissue sodium concentration using flip angle sweep

摘要

Tissue sodium concentration (TSC) provides valuable information about tissue viability in pathologies such as ischemic stroke. Here, regions with dead tissue and maximum extracellular space further locally elongate T_1 values. The accuracy of TSC quantification is affected by T_1 contributions. Commonly, they are partially reduced by using relatively long repetition times (TR), restricted by the total measurement times (TA) e.g. TR = 100 ms and TA = 10 min~1. This approach yields significant local errors in TSC for long T_1 values such as those affected by stroke. In this work, we use a flip angle sweep approach with short TR to reduce T_1 bias in the quantification of TSC.