Ultrashort Echo Time and Fast Field Echo Imaging for Spine Bone Imaging with Application in Spondylolysis Evaluation

Isthmic spondylolysis is characterized by a stress injury to the pars interarticularis bones of the lumbar spines and is often missed by conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), necessitating a computed tomography (CT) for accurate diagnosis. We compare MRI techniques suitable for producing CT...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computation 2024-08, Vol.12 (8), p.152
Main Authors: Vucevic, Diana, Malis, Vadim, Yamashita, Yuichi, Mesa, Anya, Yamaguchi, Tomosuke, Achar, Suraj, Miyazaki, Mitsue, Bae, Won C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Back pain
Backache
bone fracture
Bones
Care and treatment
Computed tomography
Diagnosis
Diagnostic imaging
Feasibility studies
Fractures
Image contrast
Image processing
Image quality
low back pain
Magnetic resonance imaging
Medical examination
Medical imaging
Methods
MRI
pars interarticularis
Radiation
Signal to noise ratio
Soft tissues
Spine
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Description
Summary:Isthmic spondylolysis is characterized by a stress injury to the pars interarticularis bones of the lumbar spines and is often missed by conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), necessitating a computed tomography (CT) for accurate diagnosis. We compare MRI techniques suitable for producing CT-like images. Lumbar spines of asymptomatic and low back pain (LBP) subjects were imaged at 3-Tesla with multi-echo ultrashort echo time (UTE) and field echo (FE) sequences followed by simple post-processing of averaging and inverting to depict spinal bones with a CT-like appearance. The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for bone was determined to compare UTE vs. FE and single-echo vs. multi-echo data. Visually, both sequences depicted cortical bone with good contrast; UTE-processed sequences provided a flatter contrast for soft tissues that made them easy to distinguish from bone, while FE-processed images had better resolution and bone–muscle contrast, which are important for fracture detection. Additionally, multi-echo images provided significantly (p = 0.03) greater CNR compared with single-echo images. Using these techniques, progressive spondylolysis was detected in an LBP subject. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using spine bone MRI to yield CT-like contrast. Through the employment of multi-echo UTE and FE sequences combined with simple processing, we observe sufficient enhancements in image quality and contrast to detect pars fractures.
ISSN:2079-3197
2079-3197
DOI:10.3390/computation12080152