MR Fingerprinting in the Knee Cartilage Compared to Conventional Methods in Combination with Automated Cartilage Segmentation

Quantitative MRI has been shown to be sensitive to early stages of cartilage degeneration in osteoarthritis, but conventional MRI techniques can measure only single parameter at a time. This poses time constraints and co-registration challenges. With MR Fingerprinting, multiple parameters can be assessed within single measurement. Here, we evaluated prototype MRF sequence in NIST phantom and healthy volunteers in combination with automatic cartilage segmentation procedure and compared to conventional techniques. We could show that the values provided by MRF sequence agreed with the values provided by conventional techniques. Therefore MRF is accurate and practical diagnosis tool for articular cartilage examination.