NMR in biomedicine
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Considerable uncertainty remains about the best ventilator strategies for the mitigation of atelectasis and associated airspace stretch in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In addition to several immediate physiological effects, atelectasis increases the risk of ventilator-associated lung injury, which has been shown to significantly worsen ARDS outcomes. A number of lung imaging techniques have made substantial headway in clarifying the mechanisms of atelectasis. ⋯ An increase in ADC was found to be a marker of atelectasis-induced overdistension. With recruitment, higher airway pressures were shown to reduce stretch rather than worsen it. Moving forward, HP MRI has significant potential to shed further light on the atelectatic processes that occur during mechanical ventilation.
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Oxygen-enhanced 3D radial ultrashort echo time magnetic resonance imaging in the healthy human lung.
The purpose of this work was to use 3D radial ultrashort echo time (UTE) MRI to perform whole-lung oxygen-enhanced (OE) imaging in humans. Eight healthy human subjects underwent two 3D radial UTE MRI acquisitions (TE = 0.08 ms): one while breathing 21% O2 and the other while breathing 100% O2. Scans were each performed over 5 min of free breathing, using prospective respiratory gating. ⋯ Mean percent signal enhancement was 6.6% ± 1.8%, near the value predicted by theory of 6.3%. No significant enhancement was seen using the conventional echo time data, confirming the importance of UTE for this acquisition strategy. 3D radial UTE MRI shows promise as a method for OE MRI that enables whole-lung coverage and isotropic spatial resolution, in comparison to existing 2D OE methods, which rely on a less time-efficient inversion recovery pulse sequence. These qualities may help OE MRI become a viable low-cost method for 3D imaging of lung function in human subjects.
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Comparative Study
Evaluation of segmented 3D acquisition schemes for whole-brain high-resolution arterial spin labeling at 3 T.
Recent technical developments have significantly increased the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of arterial spin labeled (ASL) perfusion MRI. Despite this, typical ASL acquisitions still employ large voxel sizes. The purpose of this work was to implement and evaluate two ASL sequences optimized for whole-brain high-resolution perfusion imaging, combining pseudo-continuous ASL (pCASL), background suppression (BS) and 3D segmented readouts, with different in-plane k-space trajectories. ⋯ Point-spread-function simulations were carried out to assess the impact of readout differences on the effective resolution. The combination of pCASL, in-plane segmented 3D readouts and BS provided high-SNR high-resolution ASL perfusion images of the whole brain. Although both sequences produced excellent image quality, the 3D RARE Stack-Of-Spirals readout yielded higher temporal and spatial SNR than 3D GRASE (spatial SNR = 8.5 ± 2.8 and 3.7 ± 1.4; temporal SNR = 27.4 ± 12.5 and 15.6 ± 7.6, respectively) and decreased through-plane blurring due to its inherent oversampling of the central k-space region, its reduced effective TE and shorter total readout time, at the expense of a slight increase in the effective in-plane voxel size.
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The chemical exchange (CE) rate of endogenous hydroxyl and amine protons with water is often comparable to the difference in their chemical shifts. These intermediate exchange processes have been imaged by the CE saturation transfer (CEST) approach with low-power and long-duration irradiation. However, the sensitivity is not optimal and, more importantly, the signal is contaminated by slow magnetization transfer processes. ⋯ Second, time-dependent CEST and CESL signals are well modeled by analytical solutions of CE-MRI with an asymmetric population approximation, which can be used for quantitative CE-MRI and validated by simulations of Bloch-McConnell equations and phantom experiments. Finally, the in vivo amine-water proton exchange contrast measured at 2.5 ppm with ω1 = 500 Hz is 18% higher in sensitivity for CESL than CEST at 9.4 T. Overall, CESL provides better exchange rate selectivity and sensitivity than CEST; therefore, CESL is more suitable for CE-MRI of intermediate exchange protons.
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Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) captures ischemic tissue that is likely to infarct, and has become one of the most widely used acute stroke imaging techniques. Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) has lately been postulated as a complementary MRI method to stratify the heterogeneously damaged DWI lesion. However, the conventional DKI acquisition time is relatively long, limiting its use in the acute stroke setting. ⋯ Importantly, substantial kurtosis-diffusion lesion mismatch was observed using the conventional (26 ± 13%, P < 0.01) and fast DKI methods (23 ± 8%, P < 0.01). In addition, regression analysis showed that the kurtosis-diffusion lesion mismatches obtained using conventional and fast DKI methods were substantially correlated (R(2) = 0.57, P = 0.02). Our results confirmed that the recently proposed fast DKI method is capable of capturing heterogeneous diffusion and kurtosis lesions in acute ischemic stroke, and thus is suitable for translational applications in the acute stroke clinical setting.