A Rapid, Whole-brain Quantification of T1 Relaxation Time Using Submillimetre Inversion-recovery EPI at 7T

Knowledge of T1 relaxation time is of great interest for clinical diagnosis or MRI sequence optimisation. For the quantitative measurement of T1, the inversion-recovery method is widely used due to its relatively good accuracy or tolerance to B1 inhomogeneity. However, 2D multi-slice- or 3D segmentation-based readout methods often preclude the effect of different signal recovery modulation depending on slice locations. Therefore, this work presents a single-slice-based inversion-recovery 2D EPI method, combined with TR-external EPI phase correction at 7T, to provide rapid, whole-brain T1 mapping with a voxel size of 0.73 × 0.73 mm2.