Morphological performance of free breathing stack-of-spirals ultrashort echo time MRI for malignant lung nodules

Motivation: The performance of three-dimensional free breathing stack-of-spirals ultrashort echo time (spiral-UTE) could provide a higher readout efficiency with advanced sequence intrinsic features than radial-trajectory, making more progress in lung-UTE imaging, but its ability for depicting malignant lung nodules is unclear. Goal(s): To investigate the performance of spiral-UTE for depicting malignant lung nodules. Approach: Qualitative and quantitative evaluations were conducted for comparisons among spiral-UTE, routine enhanced VIBE sequence using lung CT as reference Results: Spiral-UTE is superior to routine VIBE sequence in showing the morphological characterizations of malignant lung nodules, and enhanced spiral-UTE provided better SNR and CNR than unenhanced spiral-UTE. Impact: Spiral-UTE provides a potential alternative to CT for showing malignant lung nodules, and with significantly superior visualization of morphological features compared to routine enhanced-VIBE. Enhanced spiral-UTE offered superior SNR and CNR for detecting subtle details of malignant nodules than unenhanced spiral-UTE.