Kidney stone imaging with 3D ultra-short echo time (UTE) magnetic resonance imaging. A phantom study.

Computed tomography (CT) is the current gold standard for imaging kidney stones, albeit at the cost of radiation exposure. Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences are insensitive to detecting the stones because of their appearance as a signal void. With the development of 2D ultra-short echo-time (UTE) MRI sequences, it becomes possible to image kidney stones in vitro. In this work, we optimize and implement a modified 3D UTE MRI sequence for imaging kidney stones embedded in agarose phantoms mimicking the kidney tissue and in urine phantoms at 3.0T. The proposed technique is capable of imaging the stones with high spatial resolution in a short scan time.