Vendor-neutrality and upgrade immunity: Post-upgrade assessment of vendor-neutral qMRI from two perspectives

We scanned the ISMRM/NIST system phantom and one healthy participant to compare vendor-neutral and vendor-native T1, MTR and MTsat maps pre- and post-upgrade. Our findings indicate a systematic T1 bias in the phantom (up to 18.5%) that is linked to post-upgrade prescan calibrations. In-vivo, MTR remains stable, whereas the T1 bias (up to 9%) affects MTsat more. On the other hand, end-to-end consistency of the vendor-neutral workflow is immune against the software upgrade (e.g., data was consistently exported in the BIDS format). To disentangle the effect of upgrades on longitudinal stability, qMRI would benefit from transparent vendor-neutral prescan calibrations.