The Application of Advanced Bone Imaging Technologies in Sports Medicine

Figure 8

Example of an axial slice of a 3D dual-echo ultrashort echo time MRI scan of the tibia, similar to previously published methods. (a, b) correspond to the first and second echoes (TE₁ = 50 μs, TE₂ = 4600 μs), respectively. It is clear that the first echo has substantially more signal in the cortical bone region than in the second echo, whereas the signal in the soft tissue region has more subtle differences. (c) Depicts the porosity index, which is computed as the ratio between the echoes: PI (%) = TE₂/TE₁  100. Although it is not obvious in the first or second echo, the PI clearly highlights the spatial variations of bone porosity in the tibial cortex [94].

(a)

(b)

(c)