Simultaneous acquisition of proton density, T1, and T2 images with triple contrast RARE sequence

A fast multislice sequence that gives proton density (PD)-, T1-, and T2-weighted images simultaneously has been developed. The triple contrast RARE (TCRARE) is based on RARE and uses two interleaved TR intervals to obtain PD-, T1-, and T2-weighted images without spatial misregistration or RF gain mismatch within 2 min. By adding a fat suppression pulse before one of two excitation pulses, it is also possible to obtain an image set with and without fat suppression in a single acquisition.