Foraminal [F]FDG uptake on PET/MRI is associated with radiculopathy and symptom reduction after image-guided nerve root block.

Background And Purpose: There is an imperfect correlation between morphological MRI findings and radiating low back pain. Nerve irritation, visualized as glucose hypermetabolism on [F]FDG-PET/MRI, has the potential to identify symptomatic segments. This study aimed to investigate the association of foraminal [F]FDG uptake on PET/MRI, radiological abnormalities and patient outcomes.

Bone Remodeling, Not Inflammation, as the Predominant Pathology in Modic Type 1 Lesions of the Lumbar Spine.

Purpose: Lesions of the vertebral endplates (Modic changes) are associated with low back pain (LBP), and different pathological processes, including inflammation, have been proposed as causative. This study aimed to explore the relationship between [18F]FDG uptake (inflammation) and [18F]NaF uptake (bone remodeling) and patient-reported back pain as well as conventional MRI detected endplate changes.

Methods: Participants were selected from an IRB-approved study, creating two arms: [18F]NaF (n = 11) and [18F]FDG (n = 11).

Improving radiologist detection of meniscal abnormality on undersampled, deep learning reconstructed knee MRI.

Background: Accurate interpretation of meniscal anomalies on knee MRI is critical for diagnosis and treatment planning, with artificial intelligence emerging as a promising tool to support and enhance this process through automated anomaly detection.

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of an artificial intelligence (AI) anomaly detection assistant on radiologists' interpretation of meniscal anomalies in undersampled, deep learning (DL)-reconstructed knee MRI and assess the relationship between reconstruction quality metrics and anomaly detection performance.

Materials And Methods: This retrospective study included 947 knee MRI examinations; 51 were excluded for poor image quality, leaving 896 participants (mean age, 44.

Association of cartilage and relaxation time measurement with hip osteoarthritis progression: A 5-year longitudinal study using voxel-based relaxometry and Z-score normalization.

Objective: To study the longitudinal changes of cartilage and relaxation time measurements in hip-OA patients.

Methods: A calibration study compared two scanner data, Scanner-1 (GE Discovery MR750 3.0T) with unilateral acquisition protocol and Scanner-2 (GE Signa Premier 3.

Higher Posterior Tibial Slope and Lower Medial Proximal Tibial Angle of the Knee Are Associated With Delayed Graft Maturation After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Surgery With Hamstring Autograft.

Purpose: To relate bone shape with anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) graft maturation, as evaluated by quantitative magnetic resonance imaging.

Methods: We retrospectively evaluated patients aged 18 to 60 years who underwent ACL reconstruction with a hamstring autograft with doubled semitendinosus and gracilis at our institution between 2018 and 2020 with isolated ACL injuries. All patients had a minimum follow-up period of 2 years.

Quantification of the in vivo brain ultrashort-T* component in healthy volunteers.

Purpose: Recent work has shown MRI is able to measure and quantify signals of phospholipid membrane-bound protons associated with myelin in the human brain. This work seeks to develop an improved technique for characterizing this brain ultrashort- component in vivo accounting for weighting.

Methods: Data from ultrashort echo time scans from 16 healthy volunteers with variable flip angles (VFA) were collected and fitted into an advanced regression model to quantify signal fraction, relaxation time, and frequency shift of the ultrashort- component.

Synthetic Knee MRI T Maps as an Avenue for Clinical Translation of Quantitative Osteoarthritis Biomarkers.

A 2D U-Net was trained to generate synthetic T maps from T maps for knee MRI to explore the feasibility of domain adaptation for enriching existing datasets and enabling rapid, reliable image reconstruction. The network was developed using 509 healthy contralateral and injured ipsilateral knee images from patients with ACL injuries and reconstruction surgeries acquired across three institutions. Network generalizability was evaluated on 343 knees acquired in a clinical setting and 46 knees from simultaneous bilateral acquisition in a research setting.

Effects of T Characteristics of Load-Bearing Hip Cartilage on Bilateral Knee Patellar Cartilage Subregions: Subjects With None to Moderate Radiographic Hip Osteoarthritis.

Background: The polyarticular nature of Osteoarthritis (OA) tends to manifest in multi-joints. Associations between cartilage health in connected joints can help identify early degeneration and offer the potential for biomechanical intervention. Such associations between hip and knee cartilages remain understudied.

Technology and Tool Development for BACPAC: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Accelerated Lumbar Spine MRI with Deep-Learning Based Image Reconstruction at 3T.

Objectives: To evaluate whether combining fast acquisitions with deep-learning reconstruction can provide diagnostically useful images and quantitative assessment comparable to standard-of-care acquisitions for lumbar spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Methods: Eighteen patients were imaged with both standard protocol and fast protocol using reduced signal averages, each protocol including sagittal fat-suppressed T2-weighted, sagittal T1-weighted, and axial T2-weighted 2D fast spin-echo sequences. Fast-acquisition data was additionally reconstructed using vendor-supplied deep-learning reconstruction with three different noise reduction factors.

Influence of patient-specific factors when comparing multifidus fat infiltration between chronic low back pain patients and asymptomatic controls.

Introduction: Many studies have attempted to link multifidus (MF) fat infiltration with muscle quality and chronic low back pain (cLBP), but there is no consensus on these relationships.

Methods: In this cross-sectional cohort study, 39 cLBP patients and 18 asymptomatic controls were included. The MF muscle was manually segmented at each lumbar disc level and fat fraction (FF) measurements were taken from the corresponding advanced imaging water-fat images.

Region of interest-specific loss functions improve T quantification with ultrafast T mapping MRI sequences in knee, hip and lumbar spine.

MRI T mapping sequences quantitatively assess tissue health and depict early degenerative changes in musculoskeletal (MSK) tissues like cartilage and intervertebral discs (IVDs) but require long acquisition times. In MSK imaging, small features in cartilage and IVDs are crucial for diagnoses and must be preserved when reconstructing accelerated data. To these ends, we propose region of interest-specific postprocessing of accelerated acquisitions: a recurrent UNet deep learning architecture that provides T maps in knee cartilage, hip cartilage, and lumbar spine IVDs from accelerated T-prepared snapshot gradient-echo acquisitions, optimizing for cartilage and IVD performance with a multi-component loss function that most heavily penalizes errors in those regions.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Lumbar Spine: Recommendations for Acquisition and Image Evaluation from the BACPAC Spine Imaging Working Group.

Management of patients suffering from low back pain (LBP) is challenging and requires development of diagnostic techniques to identify specific patient subgroups and phenotypes in order to customize treatment and predict clinical outcome. The Back Pain Consortium (BACPAC) Research Program Spine Imaging Working Group has developed standard operating procedures (SOPs) for spinal imaging protocols to be used in all BACPAC studies. These SOPs include procedures to conduct spinal imaging assessments with guidelines for standardizing the collection, reading/grading (using structured reporting with semi-quantitative evaluation using ordinal rating scales), and storage of images.

Magnetization-prepared spoiled gradient-echo snapshot imaging for efficient measurement of R -R in knee cartilage.

Purpose: To validate the potential of quantifying R -R using one pair of signals with T preparation and T preparation incorporated to magnetization-prepared angle-modulated partitioned k-space spoiled gradient-echo snapshots (MAPSS) acquisition and to find an optimal preparation time (T ) for in vivo knee MRI.

Methods: Bloch equation simulations were first performed to assess the accuracy of quantifying R -R using T - and T -prepared signals with an equivalent T . For validation of this technique in comparison to the conventional approach that calculates R -R after estimating both T and T , phantom experiments and in vivo validation with five healthy subjects and five osteoarthritis patients were performed at a clinical 3T scanner.

Simultaneous multi-slice spin- and gradient-echo dynamic susceptibility-contrast perfusion-weighted MRI of gliomas.

Although combined spin- and gradient-echo (SAGE) dynamic susceptibility-contrast (DSC) MRI can provide perfusion quantification that is sensitive to both macrovessels and microvessels while correcting for T -shortening effects, spatial coverage is often limited in order to maintain a high temporal resolution for DSC quantification. In this work, we combined a SAGE echo-planar imaging (EPI) sequence with simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) excitation and blipped controlled aliasing in parallel imaging (blipped CAIPI) at 3 T to achieve both high temporal resolution and whole brain coverage. Two protocols using this sequence with multi-band (MB) acceleration factors of 2 and 3 were evaluated in 20 patients with treated gliomas to determine the optimal scan parameters for clinical use.

Investigating the Association of Metabolic Biomarkers With Knee Cartilage Composition and Structural Abnormalities Using MRI: A Pilot Study.

Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the metabolic syndrome-associated phenotype of osteoarthritis by investigating the cross-sectional associations of glycemic markers and serum lipids with knee cartilage composition and structural abnormalities in middle-aged adults.

Design: Twenty participants between 40 to 70 years of age with Kellgren-Lawrence score 0-1 in at least one knee were recruited at a single center. Knee cartilage composition was assessed using 3.

Bone material analogues for PET/MRI phantoms.

Purpose: To develop bone material analogues that can be used in construction of phantoms for simultaneous PET/MRI systems.

Methods: Plaster was used as the basis for the bone material analogues tested in this study. It was mixed with varying concentrations of an iodinated CT contrast, a gadolinium-based MR contrast agent, and copper sulfate to modulate the attenuation properties and MRI properties (T1 and T2*).

Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Exhibit a More Mineralized Deep Cartilage Layer Compared with Nondiabetic Controls: A Pilot Study.

Objective: To assess differences in biochemical composition of the deep cartilage layer in subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and nondiabetic controls using UTE (ultra-short echo time) T2* mapping and to investigate the association of vascular health and UTE T2* measurements.

Design: Ten subjects with T2DM matched for age, sex, and body mass index with 10 nondiabetic controls. A 3D UTE sequence with 6 echo times was acquired using 3T magnetic resonance imaging of the knee.

The Relationship Between Endplate Pathology and Patient-reported Symptoms for Chronic Low Back Pain Depends on Lumbar Paraspinal Muscle Quality.

Study Design: Cross-sectional cohort study of chronic low back pain (CLBP) patients and matched controls.

Objective: To explore the interplay between vertebral endplate damage and adjacent paraspinal muscle (PSM) quality, and to test their association in a cohort of patients with CLBP and matched controls.

Summary Of Background Data: Nonspecific CLBP is challenging to diagnose, in part, due to uncertainty regarding the source of pain.

Trabecular bone microstructure is impaired in the proximal femur of human immunodeficiency virus-infected men with normal bone mineral density.

Background: There is evidence that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and antiretroviral therapy (ART) are independent risk factors for osteoporosis and fracture which is not solely explained by changes in bone mineral density. Thus, we hypothesized that the assessment of trabecular microstructure might play an important role for bone quality in this population and might explain the increased fracture risk. In this study, we have assessed bone microstructure in the proximal femur using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as well as in the extremities using high resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) in HIV-infected men and healthy controls and compared these findings to those based on areal bone mineral density (aBMD) derived from dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) which is the standard clinical parameter for the diagnosis of osteoporosis.