Magnetic resonance in medicine : official journal of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
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Phase-encoded multishot SPIRAL approaches were used to acquire true 3D cerebral blood flow images of the human head using arterial spin tagging approaches. Multiple-inversion background suppression techniques, which suppress phase noise due to interacquisition fluctuations in the static magnetic field, reduced the temporal standard deviation of true 3D delta M images acquired using arterial spin tagging approaches by approximately 50%. ⋯ Magn Reson Med 44:92-100, 2000. Published 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
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This project incorporated a novel inductive coupling structure of three micro coils into an invasive device tip to determine both its tip position and orientation. Moreover, with the introduction of a new target-navigation technique the MR scan plane was defined automatically by the invasive device orientation and target tissue location. A time domain multiplexing technique was applied for simultaneous MR imaging and device tracking. ⋯ Ex vivo phantom and in vivo animal experiments were performed to test this new technique. The methods developed in this project provide a new active technique for interventional device guidance using MRI. Magn Reson Med 44:56-65, 2000.
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Comparative Study Clinical Trial Controlled Clinical Trial
Optimization and evaluation of the signal intensity change in multisection oxygen-enhanced MR lung imaging.
The behavior of the signal intensity in MRI of human lungs was investigated during inhalation of pure oxygen. Nine volunteers were examined, five using a breath-hold and four using a non-breath-hold technique. Four coronal slices were acquired in each volunteer using an inversion recovery turbo spin-echo sequence. ⋯ Inhalation of pure oxygen reduced the mean T(1) time of the lungs from 1280 (+/-85) msec to 1224 (+/-139) msec without breath-hold and from 1219 (+/-176) to 1074 (+/-92) msec with breath-hold. Therefore, an optimized sequence and measurement protocol provided significant signal intensity changes utilizing 100% oxygen. Magn Reson Med 43:860-866, 2000.
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The nature of vascular contribution to blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast used in functional MRI (fMRI) is poorly understood. To investigate vascular contributions at an ultrahigh magnetic field of 9.4 T, diffusion-weighted fMRI techniques were used in a rat forepaw stimulation model. Tissue and blood T(2) values were measured to optimize the echo time for fMRI. ⋯ This effect was attributed to the extravascular contribution from large vessels. These findings demonstrate that caution should be exercised when interpreting that higher percent changes obtained with gradient-echo BOLD fMRI are related to stronger neural activation. Magn Reson Med 42:919-928, 1999.
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The spin-echo response to visual activation was studied as a function of spatial resolution at a field of 1.5 T. The results showed that the increase in absolute T(2) upon activation was as large as 22.8 +/- 3.1% (P < 0.05) at the highest resolution (5.3 mm(3)), while it was as small as 3.5 +/- 0.2% (P < 0.05) at the lowest resolution (42.2 mm(3)). In addition, upon increasing resolution, the spin-echo signal decay as a function of echo time changed from monoexponential to nonexponential. ⋯ The data can be quantitatively accounted for using a model based on the intravascular origin of the spin-echo effect including both macrovascular and microvascular effects. Existing theories for the spin-echo BOLD effect based on diffusion through field gradients predict negligible spin-echo effects inside the large vessels and are therefore incompatible with the data. Magn Reson Med 42:617-626, 1999.