Simultaneous Estimation of T1, T2 and B1 Maps From Relaxometry MR Sequences

International audienceInterest in quantitative MRI and relaxometry imaging is rapidly increasing to enable the discovery of new MRI disease imaging biomarkers. While DESPOT1 is a robust method for rapid whole-brain voxel-wise mapping of the longitudinal relaxation time (T1), the approach is inherently sensitive to inaccuracies in the transmitted flip angles, de- fined by the B1 inhomogeneity field, which become more severe at high field strengths (e.g., 3T). We propose a new approach for simultaneously mapping the B1 field, M0 (proton density), T1 and T2 relaxation times based on regular fast T1 and T2 relaxometry sequences. The new method is based on the intrinsic correlation between the T1 and T2 relaxometry sequences to jointly estimate all maps. It requires no additional sequence for the B1 correction. We evaluated our proposed algorithm on simulated and in-vivo data at 3T, demonstrating its improved accuracy with respect to regular separate estimation methods