The value of relaxation times and density measurements in clinical MRI

The hope that MRI relaxation time signatures would identify tissues, specifically, malignancies, has not been realized. This is due much less to measurement inaccuracies than to a large intrinsic variability and overlaps between malignancies and many benign pathologies. Neither has there been success in predicting relaxation times from basic tissue compositions. Nevertheless, MRI provides a qualitative measure of tissue hydration, and of flow, on the basis of relaxation times. Furthermore, pixel-by-pixel maps of relaxation times have proven useful in understanding the MRI process, in predicting the efficacy of untried techniques, and replace, in many circumstances, the need for acquisition of images with diverse sequencing parameters.