Improving the accuracy of cross‐relaxation imaging

Cross‐relaxation imaging (CRI) provides biomarkers sensitive to the macromolecular content of tissue. Although the CRI parameters are sufficiently precise to exhibit significant correlations with macromolecular content in tissue, their accuracy is hindered by the CRI modeling and measurement variability. In this article, several sources of CRI variability are examined, such as T1 mapping bias, magnetization transfer signal drift, and inaccuracies due to tissue modeling. Simple corrections schemes are proposed to account for these effects and to improve the CRI accuracy. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 22, 67–72, 2012