T1 quantification with inversion recovery TrueFISP

A snapshot FLASH sequence can be used to acquire the time course of longitudinal magnetization during its recovery after a single inversion pulse. However, excitation pulses disturb the exponential recovery of longitudinal magnetization and may produce systematic errors in T1 estimations. In this context the possibility of using the TrueFISP sequence to detect the recovery of longitudinal magnetization for quantitative T1 measurements was examined. Experiments were performed on different Gd-doped water phantoms and on humans. T1 values derived from inversion recovery TrueFISP were in excellent agreement with the single-point method even for flip angles up to 50. In terms of T1 accuracy and SNR, the proposed method seems to be superior to the conventional inversion recovery snapshot FLASH technique. © 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.