Investigation of cortical bone using magnetic resonance imaging is a developing field, which uses short/ultrashort echo time (TE) pulse sequences to quantify bone water content and to obtain indirect information about bone microstructure.

To improve the accuracy of the previously proposed technique of free water T₁ quantification and to seek the relationship between cortical bone free water T₁ and its mechanical competence.

Prospective.

Twenty samples of bovine tibia bone.

3.0 T; ultra‐fast two‐dimensional gradient echo, Radio frequency‐spoiled three‐dimensional gradient echo.

Cortical bone free water T₁ was quantified via three different methods: inversion recovery (IR), variable flip angle (VFA), and variable repetition time (VTR). Signal‐to‐noise ratio was measured by dividing the signal of each segmented sample to …