Optimized three-dimensional ultrashort echo time: Magnetic resonance fingerprinting for myelin tissue fraction mapping

Quantitative assessment of brain myelination has gained attention for both research and diagnosis of neurological diseases. However, conventional pulse sequences cannot directly acquire the myelin-proton signals due to its extremely short T2 and T2* values. To obtain the myelin-proton signals, dedicated short T2 acquisition techniques, such as ultrashort echo time (UTE) imaging, have been introduced. However, it remains challenging to isolate the myelin-proton signals from tissues with longer T2. In this article, we extended our previous two-dimensional ultrashort echo time magnetic resonance fingerprinting (UTE-MRF) with dual-echo acquisition to three dimensional (3D). Given a relatively low proton density (PD) of myelin-proton, we utilized Cramer-Rao Lower Bound to encode myelin-proton with the maximal SNR efficiency for optimizing the MR fingerprinting design, in order to improve the sensitivity of the sequence to myelin-proton. In addition, with a second echo of approximately 3 ms, myelin-water component can be also captured. A myelin-tissue (myelin-proton and myelin-water) fraction mapping can be thus calculated. The optimized 3D UTE-MRF with dual-echo acquisition is tested in simulations, physical phantom and in vivo studies of both healthy subjects and multiple sclerosis patients. The results suggest that the rapidly decayed myelin-proton and myelin-water signal can be depicted with UTE signals of our method at clinically relevant resolution (1.8 mm isotropic) in 15 min. With its good sensitivity to myelin loss in multiple sclerosis patients demonstrated, our method for the whole brain myelin-tissue fraction mapping in clinical friendly scan time has the potential for routine clinical imaging.