Magnetic resonance in medicine : official journal of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
-
MR spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) with whole brain coverage in clinically feasible acquisition times still remains a major challenge. A combination of MRSI with parallel imaging has shown promise to reduce the long encoding times and 2D acceleration with a large array coil is expected to provide high acceleration capability. In this work a very high-speed method for 3D-MRSI based on the combination of proton echo planar spectroscopic imaging (PEPSI) with regularized 2D-SENSE reconstruction is developed. ⋯ We show that the acquisition of short-TE (15 ms) 3D-PEPSI at 3 T with a 32 x 32 x 8 spatial matrix using a 32-channel array coil can be accelerated 8-fold (R = 4 x 2) along y-z to achieve a minimum acquisition time of 1 min. Maps of the concentrations of N-acetyl-aspartate, creatine, choline, and glutamate were obtained with moderate reduction in spatial-spectral quality. The short acquisition time makes the method suitable for volumetric metabolite mapping in clinical studies.
-
A precise contrast agent (CA) arterial input function (AIF) is important for accurate quantitative analysis of dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE)-MRI. This paper proposes a method to estimate the AIF using the dynamic data from multiple reference tissues, assuming that their AIFs have the same shape, with a possible difference in bolus arrival time. By minimizing a cost function, one can simultaneously estimate the parameters and underlying AIF of the reference tissues. ⋯ Simulations suggest that this method can provide a reliable estimate of the AIF for DCE-MRI data with a moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and temporal resolution, and its performance increases significantly as the SNR and temporal resolution increase. As demonstrated by its clinical application, sufficient reference tissues can be easily obtained from normal tissues and subregions segmented from a tumor region of interest (ROI), which suggests this method can be generally applied to cancer-based DCE-MRI studies to estimate the AIF. This method is applicable to general kinetic models in DCE-MRI, as well as other CE imaging modalities.
-
A novel approach for quantifying cerebral blood flow (CBF) is proposed that combines the bookend technique of calculating cerebral perfusion with an automatic postprocessing algorithm. The reproducibility of the quantitative CBF (qCBF) measurement in healthy controls (N = 8) showed a higher intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and lower coefficient of variation (COV) when calculated with automatic analysis (ICC/COV = 0.90/0.09) than when compared to conventional manual analysis (ICC/COV = 0.58/0.19). Also, the reproducibility in patients (N = 25) was successfully evaluated with the automatic analysis (ICC/COV = 0.81/0.14). ⋯ Mean transit time (MTT) increased by 1.9% and 3.8% per decade in WM (5.04 +/- 0.88 s) and GM (4.14 +/- 0.80 s), respectively. qCBF and MTT values between males (N = 85) and females (N = 90) were significantly different in GM. Women showed 11% higher qCBF as well as a higher decrease in qCBF with increasing age than men in the whole brain (WB). Our results supported the notion that population average empirical quantification of cerebral perfusion is subject to individual variation as well as age- and gender-dependent variability.
-
Balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) is hindered by the inherent off-resonance sensitivity and unwanted bright fat signal. Multiple-acquisition SSFP combination methods, where multiple datasets with different fixed RF phase increments are acquired, have been used for shaping the SSFP spectrum to solve both problems. We present a new combination method (weighted-combination SSFP or WC-SSFP) that preserves SSFP contrast and enables banding-reduction and fat-water separation. ⋯ A drawback of fat suppression methods that create a broad stop-band around the fat resonance is the wedge shape of the stop-band leading to imperfect suppression. WC-SSFP improves the suppression of the stop-band without affecting the pass-band performance, and prevents fat signal from obscuring the tissues of interest in the presence of considerable resonant frequency variations. The method further facilitates the use of SSFP imaging by providing a control parameter to adjust the level of banding-reduction or fat suppression to application-specific needs.
-
A novel concept for visualization of positive contrast originating from susceptibility-related magnetic field distortions is presented. In unbalanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) the generic, gradient-induced dephasing competes with local gradient fields generated by paramagnetic materials. Thus, within the same image, SSFP may morph its own appearance from unbalanced to balanced SSFP (bSSFP) as a result of local gradient compensation. ⋯ In this study, the conceptual issues of local gradient compensation and frequency matching, as well as the feasibility of proper detection of marker materials for interventional MRI from hyperintense pixels locations, are evaluated both in vitro and in vivo. Signal dependencies of morphing SSFP on sequence parameters such as flip angle or repetition time are investigated theoretically and experimentally. In addition to passive tracking of interventional devices, morphing SSFP might also be a promising new concept for the generation of positive contrast from super-paramagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) particles in contrast-enhanced MRI as well as for particle tracking.