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Magnetic resonance T₁‐weighted images are routinely used for human brain segmentation, brain parcellation, and clinical diagnosis of demyelinating diseases. Myelin is thought to influence the longitudinal relaxation commonly described by a mono‐exponential recovery, although reports of bi‐exponential longitudinal relaxation have been published. The purpose of this work was to investigate if a myelin water T₁ contribution could be separated in geometrically sampled Look‐Locker trains of low flip angle gradient echoes.

T₁ relaxograms from normal human brain were computed by a spatially regularized inverse Laplace transform after estimating the apparent inversion efficiency.

With sufficiently long inversion‐time sampling (ca. 5 × T₁ of cerebrospinal fluid), the T₁ relaxogram revealed a short‐T₁ peak (106–225 ms). The apparent fraction of this water component increased in …