Reliable high-resolution in vivo human knee T1ρ imaging quantification with robust fitting methods

Quantitative MR T1ρ and T2 imaging are promising methods to detect osteoarthritis at its early stage. Current T1ρ and T2 mapping in human subjects is limited to a relatively low resolution which has limited sensitivity to focal lesions due to partial-volume effects. One of the hurdles to achieving high resolution is the increase in fitting bias when using a conventional nonlinear least-squares fitting with low SNR images. In this study, we evaluated T1ρ quantification with in-vivo high-resolution imaging with different fitting methods.