• Grzegorz Bauman, Michael Puderbach, Michael Deimling, Vladimir Jellus, Christophe Chefd'hotel, Julien Dinkel, Christian Hintze, Hans-Ulrich Kauczor, and Lothar R Schad.
• Department of Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany. g.bauman@dkfz.de
• Magn Reson Med. 2009 Sep 1;62(3):656-64.

AbstractAssessment of regional lung perfusion and ventilation has significant clinical value for the diagnosis and follow-up of pulmonary diseases. In this work a new method of non-contrast-enhanced functional lung MRI (not dependent on intravenous or inhalative contrast agents) is proposed. A two-dimensional (2D) true fast imaging with steady precession (TrueFISP) pulse sequence (TR/TE = 1.9 ms/0.8 ms, acquisition time [TA] = 112 ms/image) was implemented on a 1.5T whole-body MR scanner. The imaging protocol comprised sets of 198 lung images acquired with an imaging rate of 3.33 images/s in coronal and sagittal view. No electrocardiogram (ECG) or respiratory triggering was used. A nonrigid image registration algorithm was applied to compensate for respiratory motion. Rapid data acquisition allowed observing intensity changes in corresponding lung areas with respect to the cardiac and respiratory frequencies. After a Fourier analysis along the time domain, two spectral lines corresponding to both frequencies were used to calculate the perfusion- and ventilation-weighted images. The described method was applied in preliminary studies on volunteers and patients showing clinical relevance to obtain non-contrast-enhanced perfusion and ventilation data.

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