Myelin water imaging from accelerated 3D-GRASE acquisitions using subspace constrained reconstruction

PURPOSE: 

Quantitative MRI markers, such as myelin water fraction (MWF) and geometric mean T 2 (IET2) (the intra-/extra-cellular water compartment), can be biomarkers for various brain disorders. However, these markers require acquiring multi-echo spin-echo images which requires long scan times. Undersampled 3D-GRAdient Echo and Spin Echo (3D-GRASE) scans with parallel imaging have been used for faster scans. Still, further acceleration is desirable. Reconstruction techniques that utilize redundancy along the echoes could be employed to achieve artifact-free maps at higher acceleration. This work examines the possibility of using one such technique, subspace constrained reconstruction (SCR), for further accelerating the 3D-GRASE scan.

METHODS: 

We propose two techniques to undersample the 3D-GRASE acquisition and exploit the redundancy across echoes. We retrospectively undersample fully sampled data from phantom and in-vivo acquisition to test these techniques. We compared our results for mapping MWF and IET2 to a reference multi-spin-echo technique. Additionally, we compare the proposed, state-of-the-art, and reference techniques with prospectively undersampled in-vivo acquisitions.

RESULTS: 

The RMSD of the MWF in retrospectively undersampled data was worse for the proposed techniques than the state-of-the-art. However, for IET2, RMSD was similar or slightly improved. In prospectively undersampled scans, undersampling artifacts deteriorated MWF maps, but not IET2 maps, which were within 10 ms of the reference map.

CONCLUSION: 

Our findings suggest that exploiting redundancy across echoes does not result in additional acceleration beyond the current state-of-the-art for MWF mapping, while it is possible to accelerate beyond state-of-the-art for IET2 mapping.