High SNR full brain relaxometry at 7T by accelerated MR-STAT

To demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the Magnetic Resonance Spin TomogrAphy in Time-domain (MR-STAT) framework for fast, high SNR relaxometry at 7T.

To deploy MR-STAT on 7T-systems, we designed optimized flip-angles using the BLAKJac-framework that incorporates the SAR-constraints. Transmit RF-inhomogeneities were mitigated by including a measured $B_1^{+}$ -map in the reconstruction. Experiments were performed on a gel-phantom and on five volunteers to explore the robustness of the sequence and its sensitivity to $B_1^{+}$ inhomogeneities. The SNR-gain at 7T was explored by comparing phantom and in vivo results to MR-STAT at 3T in terms of SNR-efficiency.

The higher SNR at 7T enabled two-fold acceleration with respect to current 2D MR-STAT protocols at lower field strengths. The resulting scan had whole-brain coverage, with 1 x 1 x 3 mm³ resolution (1.5 mm slice-gap) and was acquired within 3 min including the $B_1^{+}$ -mapping. After $B_1^{+}$ -correction, the estimated T₁ and T₂ in a phantom showed a mean relative error of, respectively, 1.7% and 4.4%. In vivo, the estimated T₁ and T₂ in gray and white matter corresponded to the range of values reported in literature with a variation over the subjects of 1.0%-2.1% (WM-GM) for T₁ and 4.3%-5.3% (WM-GM) for T₂. We measured a higher SNR-efficiency at 7T (R = 2) than at 3T for both T₁ and T₂ with, respectively, a 4.1 and 2.3 times increase in SNR-efficiency.

We presented an accelerated version of MR-STAT tailored to high field (7T) MRI using a low-SAR flip-angle train and showed high quality parameter maps with an increased SNR-efficiency compared to MR-STAT at 3T.