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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Dec 1.
Published in final edited form as: Magn Reson Med. 2017 Jan 11;78(6):2136–2148. doi: 10.1002/mrm.26577

Figure 8.

Figure 8

SNR was measured in the patellar cartilage, the medial meniscus, the patellar tendon, the posterior cruciate ligament, the gastrocnemius muscle, femoral bone marrow (“Fat”), and synovial fluid. (a–d) Increasing the flip angle results in lower signal in the meniscus (solid arrows) in the water S+ images. (e–h) While decreasing overall signal from soft-tissues, higher flip angles also increase cartilage-fluid contrast (dotted arrows) in the water S− images. The increasing flip angle also results in better contrast between the synovial fluid and membrane. (i) By comparing the normalized SNR as a function of flip angle, the SNR for all soft-tissues decreases with an increasing flip angle while the fat and fluid SNR stays relatively constant. (j) An increasing flip-angle increases the cartilage-fluid CNR due to constant fluid signal and attenuated cartilage signals. At a flip of angle of 30°, there is considerably lower meniscal and muscle signal, which reduces the CNR between those tissues and cartilage.