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CT is the clinical standard for surgical planning of craniofacial abnormalities in pediatric patients. This study evaluated three MRI cranial bone imaging techniques for their strengths and limitations as a radiation-free alternative to CT.

Ten healthy adults were scanned at 3 T with three MRI sequences: dual-radiofrequency and dual-echo ultrashort echo time sequence (DURANDE), zero echo time (ZTE), and gradient-echo (GRE). DURANDE bright-bone images were generated by exploiting bone signal intensity dependence on RF pulse duration and echo time, while ZTE bright-bone images were obtained via logarithmic inversion. Three skull segmentations were derived, and the overlap of the binary masks was quantified using dice similarity coefficient. Craniometric distances were measured, and their agreement was quantified.

There was good overlap of the three masks and excellent …