Abstract:Fast brain T1 mapping is a quantitative technique of magnetic resonance imaging, and can provide important reference for the diagnosis of several brain diseases, such as Parkinson, epilepsy and hepatic encephalopathy. Fast T1 mapping techniques proposed previously had sped up acquisition to several seconds per slice. However, most of these techniques suffered seriously from the field inhomogeneity of main field, transmit field and susceptibility artifacts, which decreased the imaging accuracy and limited the clinic applications. To overcome the above mentioned shortcomings, we proposed a fast brain T1 mapping technique based on TurboFLASH and evaluated it on computer simulation, phantom experiment, and human brain T1 mapping. Results showed that T1 values from the proposed method were very close to the gold standard and literature (differences being less than 3%). Besides, the proposed technique can increase the acquisition speed to 3s per slice (with a slice resolution of 1.1 mm×1.1 mm) and 2 min for the whole brain (with a 4 mm slice distance).