Articular Cartilage Assessment Using Ultrashort Echo Time MRI: A Review

Articular cartilage is a major component of the human knee joint which may be affected by a variety of degenerative mechanisms associated with joint pathologies and/or the aging process. Ultrashort echo time (UTE) sequences with a TE less than 100 mu s are capable of detecting signals from both fast- and slow-relaxing water protons in cartilage. This allows comprehensive evaluation of all the cartilage layers, especially for the short T-2 layers which include the deep and calcified zones. Several ultrashort echo time (UTE) techniques have recently been developed for both morphological imaging and quantitative cartilage assessment. This review article summarizes the current catalog techniques based on UTE Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that have been utilized for such purposes in the human knee joint, such as T-1, T-2* , T-1 rho, magnetization transfer (MT), double echo steady state (DESS), quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and inversion recovery (IR). The contrast mechanisms as well as the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed.