Publications by authors named "Lena Kakos"

Patients with psoriatic arthritis commonly have abnormalities of their entheses, which are the connections between tendons and bone. There are shortcomings with the use of conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences for the evaluation of entheses and tendons, whereas ultrashort echo time (UTE) sequences are superior for the detection of high signals, and can also be used for non-invasive quantitative assessments of these structures. The combination of UTE-MRI with an adiabatic-T preparation (UTE-Adiab-T) allows for reliable assessment of entheses and tendons with decreased susceptibility to detrimental magic angle effects.

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Article Synopsis
  • Recent studies have increasingly used ultrashort echo time magnetic resonance imaging (UTE-MRI) to evaluate the mechanical and microstructural properties of cortical bone, allowing for better quantitative assessments of bone structure.
  • Traditional bicomponent models for analyzing T2* decay in MRI often overestimate bound water content due to the presence of fat in the bone; thus, a new tricomponent model has been developed to more accurately account for fat's effect.
  • This research demonstrated that using the tricomponent model provides stronger correlations between water pool fractions and both porosity and mechanical properties of human cortical bone, suggesting it significantly improves bone evaluation techniques.
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Knee degeneration involves all the major tissues in the joint. However, conventional MRI sequences can only detect signals from long T2 tissues such as the superficial cartilage, with little signal from the deep cartilage, menisci, ligaments, tendons and bone. It is highly desirable to develop new sequences that can detect signal from all major tissues in the knee.

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Cortical bone shows as a signal void when using conventional clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Ultrashort echo time MRI (UTE-MRI) can acquire high signal from cortical bone, thus enabling quantitative assessments. Magnetization transfer (MT) imaging combined with UTE-MRI can indirectly assess protons in the organic matrix of bone.

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