Comparison of Pulmonary Nodule Morphology on Pre-Contrast and Delayed Post-Contrast Stack-of-Spirals Ultrashort Echo Time MRI

Background

Stack-of-spirals ultrashort TE (spiral-UTE) MRI has shown promise for radiation-free pulmonary nodule detection, and previous studies have reported closely matched observed pulmonary nodule detection rates between contrast-enhanced (UTEe) and unenhanced (UTEu) acquisitions. However, whether this performance extends to detailed lesion-level morphological characterization and whether delayed post-contrast spiral-UTE provides additional morphological information compared with the pre-contrast acquisition under the clinical imaging protocol remain incompletely understood. Therefore, this study compared UTEu and UTEe for lesion-level morphological assessment using CT as the reference standard.