On the elimination of the fat saturation effect in ultrashort echo-time imaging of Achilles tendons.

We investigated tri‑component analysis of 2D-UTE in-vivo measurements on a clinical 3T scanner and tested its ability to eliminate the effect of fat suppression on short T2* values in Achilles tendons. We found that fat-suppressed acquisition with two-component analysis provides ratios of short-T2* to long-T2* component intensities that are substantially lower (by a factor 0.95 to 0.55) than those resulting from fat-unsuppressed acquisition and tri-component fitting. Hence it seems that the combination of 2D-UTE acquisition with tri-component analysis might contribute to further improvement of T2* estimation accuracy.