Single-sided NMR for the diagnosis of osteoporosis: Diffusion weighted pulse sequences for the estimation of trabecular bone volume fraction in the presence of muscle tissue

• Published in: Microporous and mesoporous materials Vol. 269; pp. 166 - 170
• Main Authors: Barbieri, M., Brizi, L., Bortolotti, V., Fantazzini, P., Nogueira d’Eurydice, M., Obruchkov, S., Liu, H., Galvosas, P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.10.2018
• Subjects: Bone volume fraction (BV/TV); Diffusion NMR; NMR; Osteoporosis; Single-sided-NMR; Diffusion NMR; Osteoporosis; NMR; Single-sided-NMR; Bone volume fraction (BV/TV)
• ISSN: 1387-1811; 1873-3093
• DOI: 10.1016/j.micromeso.2017.05.023

The bone volume fraction, defined as the Bone-Volume-To-Total-Volume ratio (BV/TV), is an important parameter in the assessment of the bone's micro-structure, and is related to the fracture risk in osteoporosis. Although Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can assess bone micro-architecture parameters in-vivo, high-field whole body MRI scanners are hardly suitable for wide-scale screening campaigns. Recently, a new NMR application to assess in laboratory the BV/TV of trabecular bone (TB) has been proposed using low-field single-sided NMR. This paper presents an improvement of this technique that allows detection of only the signal from the marrow in the TB suppressing signals from other tissues, which may be present in the sensitive volume of single-sided scanners in a real scenario. The improvement was achieved by filtering signal acquisition by molecular diffusion. Experiments based on an ad-hoc designed Diffusion Weighted T1−T2 pulse sequence have demonstrated that muscle and cartilage signals can be suppressed by using diffusion weighting. On the basis of those experiments, a 1D measurement was established to allow correct estimation of the BV/TV of a TB sample also in the presence of muscle tissue in the sensitive volume of the NMR-scanner. The experiments presented, carried out with the NMR-MOUSE PM10 and the NMR-MOLE, exploiting diffusion-weighted pulse sequences, may pave the way for the in-vivo BV/TV evaluation using single-sided scanners. [Display omitted] •Microstructural parameters are important to predict fracture risk in osteoporosis.•Trabecular bone volume fraction can be estimated by using single-sided NMR.•Towards in-vivo application, suppression of muscle tissue signal is needed.•D-T2 pulse sequence suggests how to acquire the marrow signal only.•Diffusion filtering suppresses the muscle signal.