Article Figures & Data
Figures
- Fig 1.
TSE (A) and BLADE (B) in a 69-year-old woman with syringomyelia C6/C7. Superior grading in BLADE compared with TSE regarding reduced flow phenomena (mean grade BLADE, 2.0; TSE, 4.0) and truncation artifacts (BLADE, 2.0; TSE, 3.5), improved contrast vertebral body/disk (BLADE, 1.5; TSE, 2.5), contrast spinal cord/CSF (BLADE, 1.5; TSE, 4.0), and diagnostic reliability for the depiction of the spinal cord (BLADE, 2.0; TSE, 5.0).
- Fig 2.
TSE (A) and BLADE (B) in a 73-year-old woman with degenerative disk disease. Improved image sharpness in BLADE (BLADE, 2.0; TSE, 4.0), reduced motion artifacts (BLADE, 2.5; TSE, 4.0), and improved reliability of spinal cord depiction (BLADE, 2.5; TSE, 5.0) compared with TSE.
- Fig 3.
TSE (A) and BLADE (B) in a 60-year-old man with myelopathy following cervical osteosynthesis. Similar metal artifacts (mean grade, 4.0) in TSE (A) and BLADE (B).
- Fig 4.
Number of examinations with nondiagnostic quality regarding all evaluation criteria in TSE and BLADE (nondiagnostic grading by at least 1 reader). *, Highly significant difference between TSE and BLADE (P < .001).
- Fig 5.
TSE (A) and BLADE (B) in a 72-year-old man with paresthesia of the left hand. Nondiagnostic image quality (image sharpness, motion artifacts, diagnostic reliability spinal cord: mean score, 5.0) in TSE (A) compared with fair, but still diagnostic quality in BLADE (B) (image sharpness, 4.0; motion artifacts, 4.0; diagnostic reliability of spinal cord, 4.5).
- Fig 6.
TSE (A, C) and BLADE (B, D) in a 19-year-old woman with paresthesia of both hands and feet after a traffic accident: no pathologic findings of the spinal cord or vertebral bodies. No motion artifacts are seen in TSE (adjacent section positions, A, C) (mean grade, 1.0); indentation artifacts (arrows) were detected on some of the BLADE (B, D) images.
- Fig 7.
BLADE sequence during 2 types of brief head motion (A, B) in a volunteer without pathologic changes of the spinal cord: nodding (A) during the first half of the data acquisition (ie, during the first concatenation) results in similar indentation artifacts (arrows) as in the patient shown in Fig 6; no relevant artifacts appear by shaking his head (B) during the second half of the data acquisition.
Tables
TSE BLADE TR (ms)/TE (ms) 3000/113 3000/112 Echo-train length 17 35 Bandwidth, Hz/pixel 140 296 Section thickness (mm)/section gap (mm) 3/0.6 3/0.6 FOV, mm × mm 250 × 250 250 × 250 Matrix size 384 × 384 384 × 384 Phase-encoding direction Head–feet Rotating Oversampling (phase-encoding direction) 85% 100% No. acquisitions 2 1 Flow compensation Yes No Acquisition time, min:s 4:17 4:20 - Table 2:
Results of the visual evaluation on a scale from 1 (excellent) to 5 (nondiagnostic): means and standard deviations
Reader 1 Reader 2 Mean (reader 1, reader 2) TSE BLADE TSE BLADE TSE BLADE Image sharpness 2.20 ± 1.04 1.62 ± 0.76*** 2.45 ± 1.11 1.50 ± 0.73*** 2.32 ± 1.02 1.56 ± 0.68*** Artifacts Motion 2.23 ± 1.24 1.55 ± 0.91*** 2.30 ± 1.18 1.55 ± 0.87*** 2.27 ± 1.17 1.55 ± 0.83*** Truncation 2.77 ± 0.99 2.42 ± 0.72* 2.53 ± 0.65 2.12 ± 0.49*** 2.65 ± 0.73 2.27 ± 0.52*** Metal 3.78 ± 0.44 3.89 ± 0.33ns 4.00 ± 0.00 3.44 ± 0.53ns 3.89 ± 0.22 3.67 ± 0.35ns Flow phenomena 2.93 ± 0.82 1.98 ± 0.77*** 3.00 ± 0.92 2.18 ± 0.62*** 2.97 ± 0.79 2.08 ± 0.62*** Contrast Vertebral body/disk 2.38 ± 0.96 2.12 ± 0.80* 1.93 ± 1.02 1.18 ± 0.47*** 2.16 ± 0.86 1.65 ± 0.54*** Spinal cord/CSF 2.42 ± 0.98 1.97 ± 0.80** 2.62 ± 1.08 1.62 ± 0.78*** 2.52 ± 0.93 1.79 ± 0.69*** Diagnostic reliability Spinal cord 3.03 ± 1.26 2.70 ± 0.89** 2.93 ± 1.19 2.38 ± 0.78*** 2.98 ± 1.16 2.54 ± 0.77*** -
Note:—Wilcoxon rank sum test; ns indicates no significant difference between TSE and BLADE (P ≥ .05);
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* P < .05;
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** P < .01;
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*** P< .001.
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TSE BLADE SNRvertebral body 11.13 ± 2.93 9.43 ± 1.93*** SNRvertebral disk 5.61 ± 2.86 5.11 ± 2.50ns SNRCSF 41.93 ± 15.23 41.29 ± 14.06ns SNRspinal cord 16.79 ± 4.54 12.99 ± 2.56*** CNRvertebral body/vertebral disk 5.52 ± 4.42 4.32 ± 3.02ns CNRCSF–spinal cord 25.14 ± 13.40 28.30 ± 13.62ns -
Note:—t test: ns indicates no significant difference between TSE and BLADE (P ≥ .05); *, P < .05; **, P < .01;
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*** , P < .001.
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