Diana Vucevic, Vadim Malis, Yuichi Yamashita, Anya Mesa, Tomosuke Yamaguchi, Suraj Achar, Mitsue Miyazaki, Won C. Bae
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
Computation a journal of computational science and engineering. Topics: computational biology, including, but not limited to: bioinformatics mathematical modeling, simulation and prediction of nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) and protein sequences, structure and functions mathematical modeling of pathways and genetic interactions neuroscience computation including neural modeling, brain theory and neural networks computational chemistry, including, but not limited to: new theories and methodology including their applications in molecular dynamics computation of electronic structure density functional theory designing and characterization of materials with computation method computation in engineering, including, but not limited to: new theories, methodology and the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) optimisation techniques and/or application of optimisation to multidisciplinary systems system identification and reduced order modelling of engineering systems parallel algorithms and high performance computing in engineering.