Q&A with Xing Lu, Saeed Jerban and Jiang Du

In today’s interview, we continue the exploration of cortical bone microstructure using ultrashort echo time UT imaging with a 3D cone trajectory. In their latest paper joint first authors Xing Lu and Saeed Jerban applied tricomponent analysis to identify bound water, pore water, and fat fractions demonstrating high specificity to bone mineral density.

For those who would like to get a quick overview of our discussion, below is an annotation of the interview. Clicking on the timestamp will take you to the exact video location where the topic is discussed.

1:40 Audioslides: The sum of fractions of pore water and fat from tricomponent fitting resulted in the highest correlations with porosity, suggesting a new potential biomarker for evaluation of bone quality.

13:46 Saeed Jerban was looking for a pioneer group in MRI bone imaging, so he contacted Jiang and since 2016 he has been at UCSD.

14:57 Jiang Du started this close collaboration with GE, and there are many hospitals in China that are interested in these techniques.

16:43 Xing Lu came to UCSD on a grant from China, and after his postdoc at UCSD he went back there to work in industry.

17:37 Three-component analysis introduces seven free parameters in the fit. The model can be simplified by treating all fat peaks as one, but the multi-peak assumption improves the specificity.

19:17 The pros and cons of taking fat into account: In human cortical bone we have considerable amount of fat, which is not the case in bovine bone. This contaminates the signal, but accounting for it results in longer scan times.

20:04 How can the study be sped up? This was primarily about feasibility, but can be sped up with interleaved acquisition and using a fixed fat spectrum.

20:46 How can this method be made available to other researchers?