FIG. 7.

Carotid artery T1 and T2 mapping of a plaque (male, 60 years old) featured with lipid, loose matrix and calcification by SIMPLE. Two central slices of the plaque are shown in a, b, including the TOF, SNAP and T2w-TSE images, and the T1, T2 maps estimated from SIMPLE. The red arrow heads indicate the lipid where low T2w signal and low T2 values were observed, and the red arrows indicate the loose matrix region with high signal on T2w image and low signal on T1w image, where elevated T1 and T2 values were found. The white arrows indicate the calcification, where the T1 and T2 cannot be reliably fitted, and were set to be zero.