Cartesian MR-STAT vs spiral MR Fingerprinting: a comparison

MR Fingerprinting (“MRF”) and MR Spin Tomography in Time-domain (“MR-STAT”) are quantitative MRI techniques that allow multiple quantitative tissue parameter maps (e.g. T1, T2 and proton density) to be estimated from a single short scan. In this work, we compare the accuracy and precision of Cartesian MR-STAT and spiral MRF on gel phantoms and in-vivo. On gel phantoms we get excellent agreement with reference measurements. In-vivo we observe differences in reconstructed T1 values. As for the precision, a more in-depth study is required to take into account differences in noise-suppression mechanisms (i.e. k-space apodization and spiral sampling window).