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Thirty-eight patients with clinical indications of infectious, degenerative, and neoplastic disease underwent an MR imaging of the spine. The SyntAc sequence, with an acquisition time of 5 minutes 40 seconds, was added to the usual imaging protocol consisting of conventional sagittal T1 TSE, T2 TSE, and STIR TSE. The image quality was rated as “good” for both synthetic and conventional images. Interreader agreement concerning lesion conspicuity was good with a Cohen kappa of 0.737. The authors conclude that the study shows that synthetic MR imaging is feasible in spine imaging and produces, in general, good image quality and diagnostic confidence.

Twenty children (30 imaging sessions, 60 MR scans) with Moyamoya disease underwent dual breath-hold hypercapnic challenge blood oxygen level–dependent MR imaging of cerebrovascular reactivity studies in the same MR imaging session. Within-day, within-subject repeatability of cerebrovascular reactivity estimates, derived from the blood oxygen level–dependent signal, was computed. Breath-hold hypercapnic challenge blood oxygen level–dependent MR imaging is a repeatable technique for the assessment of cerebrovascular reactivity in children with Moyamoya disease and is reliably interpretable for use in clinical practice.