Reduction of acquisition time for muscle functional magnetic resonance images

概要

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Exercise induced muscle activity is essential in sports medicine. The previous studies proposed muscle functional magnetic resonance imaging (mfMRI) which visualized muscle activity. However, the mfMRI used the spin echo (SE) sequence, and SE requires several minutes for acquisition time. The purpose of this study was to judge the feasibility of the mfMRI using ultrafast imaging (fast-acquired mfMRI: fast-mfMRI) . The 10 subjects performed 200 repetitions of ankle plantar flexion. T2 relaxation curves of muscle were compared with multiple spin echo (MSE) and spin-echo echo-planar-imaging (SE-EPI) . The fast-mfMRI was the images which the processed images fused into the morphologic images. In the result, there was no problem using the T2 relaxations MR signals from SE-EPI in the range of the short TE. In the fused images, the areas of activated muscle in the fast-mfMRI from the SE-EPI images were in good agreement with that of the fast-mfMRI from the MSE images. In the geometric location of the fast-mfMRI, there was no major difference between the morphologic image and the functional image. Morphological and functional information from the fast-mfMRI can be applied to the human trunk which has a limited scan time.