The uncertainty relationship in MRI is shown. The result of uncertainty relationship is compared with other factors influencing the resolution of MRI. Our estimations show that the uncertainty relationship is of no significance in practice.
The integration of positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been an ongoing research topic for the last 20 years. This paper gives an overview of the different developments and the technical problems associated with combining PET and MRI in one system. After explaining the different detector concepts for integrating PET-MRI and minimising interference the limitations and advantages of different solutions for the detector and system are described for preclinical and clinical imaging systems. The different integrated PET-MRI systems are described in detail. Bes…
GRASP MRI: A Decade of Innovation from Bench to Bedside
New York University Grossman School of Medicine(纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院);Bernard and Irene Schwartz Center for Biomedical Imaging(伯纳德和艾琳·施瓦茨生物医学成像中心);Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R)(先进成像创新与研究)
The human lung and its functions are extremely sensitive to orientation and posture, and debate continues as to the role of gravity and the surrounding anatomy in determining lung function and heterogeneity of perfusion and ventilation. However, study of these effects is difficult. The conventional high-field magnets used for most hyperpolarized 3He MRI of the human lung, and most other common radiological imaging modalities including PET and CT, restrict subjects to lying horizontally, minimizing most gravitational effects. In this paper, we briefly review the motivation for posture-dependent…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers superior soft tissue contrast and is widely used in biomedicine. However, conventional MRI is not quantitative, which presents a bottleneck in image analysis and digital healthcare. Typically, additional scans are required to disentangle the effect of multiple parameters of MR and extract quantitative tissue properties. Here we investigate a data-driven strategy Q^2 MRI (Qualitative and Quantitative MRI) to derive quantitative parametric maps from standard MR images without additional data acquisition. By taking advantage of the interdependency between v…
The purpose of this study was to develop a method for tissue elasticity imaging using tagged magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). First, we developed a cyclic pressure device that used air to remotely transmit the power to generate cyclic deformation in an object. The pressure induced by the cyclic pressure device was measured by MRI-compatible force sensors. Second, we developed a software to calculate Young's modulus from tagged MRI data using the harmonic phase (HARP) method and the finite element method (FEM). We also developed a software to extract tag-cross points from tagged MRI data. Fina…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the cornerstone technique for diagnostic medicine, biology, and neuroscience. This imaging method is highly innovative, noninvasive and its impact continues to grow. It can be used for measuring changes in the brain after enhanced neural activity, detecting early cancerous cells in tissue, as well as for imaging nanoscale biological structures, and controlling fluid dynamics, and it can be beneficial for cardiovascular imaging. The MRI performance is characterized by a signal-to-noise ratio, however the spatial resolution and image contrast depend strongly o…
Optical pumping of He-3 produces large (hyper) nuclear-spin polarizations independent of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) field strength. This allows lung MRI to be performed at reduced fields with many associated benefits, such as lower tissue susceptibility gradients and decreased power absorption rates. Here we present results of 2D imaging as well as accurate 1D gas diffusion mapping of the human lung using He-3 at very low field (3 mT). Furthermore, measurements of transverse relaxation in zero applied gradient are shown to accurately track pulmonary oxygen partial pressure, opening t…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is extensively used for diagnosis and image-guided therapeutics. Due to hardware, physical and physiological limitations, acquisition of high-resolution MRI data takes long scan time at high system cost, and could be limited to low spatial coverage and also subject to motion artifacts. Super-resolution MRI can be achieved with deep learning, which is a promising approach and has a great potential for preclinical and clinical imaging. Compared with polynomial interpolation or sparse-coding algorithms, deep learning extracts prior knowledge from big data and prod…
A Voxel-Wise Uncertainty-Guided Framework for Glioma Segmentation Using Spherical Projection-Based U-Net and Localized Refinement in Multi-Parametric MRI
Data from a multi-parametric MRI study of patients with possible early-stage prostate cancer was assessed with a view to creating an efficient clinical protocol. Based on a correlation analysis suggesting that diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) scores are more strongly correlated with overall PIRADS scores than other modalities such as dynamic contrast enhanced imaging or spectroscopy, we investigate the combination of T2-weighted imaging (T2w) and DWI as a potential diagnostic tool for prostate cancer detection, staging and guided biopsies. Quantification of the noise floor in the DWI images an…
Currently, the deep neural network is the mainstream for machine learning, and being actively developed for biomedical imaging applications with an increasing emphasis on tomographic reconstruction for MRI, CT, and other imaging modalities. Multiple deep-learning-based approaches were applied to MRI image reconstruction from k-space samples to final images. Each of these studies assumes a given pulse sequence that produces incomplete and/or inconsistent data in the Fourier space, and targets a trained neural network that recovers an underlying image as close as possible to the ground truth. Fo…
In this work a mu=-1 metamaterial (MM) lens for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is demonstrated. MRI uses surface coils to detect the radiofrequency(RF) energy absorbed and emitted by the nuclear spins in the imaged object. The proposed MM lens manipulates the RF field detected by these surface coils, so that the coil sensitivity and spatial localization is substantially improved. Beyond this specific application, we feel that the reported results are the experimental confirmation of a new concept for the manipulation of RF field in MRI, which paves the way to many other interesting applicati…
This work introduces a compartment-based model for apparent soma and neurite density imaging (SANDI) using non-invasive diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI). The existing conjecture in brain microstructure imaging trough DW-MRI presents water diffusion in white (WM) and grey (GM) matter as restricted diffusion in neurites, modelled by infinite cylinders of null radius embedded in the hindered extra-neurite water. The extra-neurite pool in WM corresponds to water in the extra-axonal space, but in GM it combines water in the extra-cellular space with water in soma. While several studies showed that t…
One of the challenges in functional brain imaging is integration of complementary imaging modalities, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). MEG, which uses highly sensitive superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) to directly measure magnetic fields of neuronal currents, cannot be combined with conventional high-field MRI in a single instrument. Indirect matching of MEG and MRI data leads to significant co-registration errors. A recently proposed imaging method - SQUID-based microtesla MRI - can be naturally combined with MEG in the…
Multi-modality imaging hardware can be integrated in a single gantry to collect diverse datasets for complementary information and spatiotemporal correlation, with excellent examples including PET-CT and PET-MRI. However, there is no CT-MRI prototype up to today due to technical challenges and associated cost-benefit considerations. Thanks to the rapid development of medical imaging, it becomes feasible now to integrate cost-effective CT and MRI imagers together for portability, popularity, and point of care. In this paper, we present the top-level design of the first portable CT-MRI system an…
Ultra-low field 13C MRI of hyperpolarized pyruvate
Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);University of Sydney(悉尼大学);Massachusetts General Hospital(麻省总医院);North Carolina State University(北卡罗来纳州立大学);Wayne State University(韦恩州立大学);University of Groningen(格罗宁根大学)
Neurosurgery targets in the thalamus can be challenging to identify during transcranial MRI-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) thermal ablation due to poor image quality. They also neighbor structures that can result in side effects if damaged. Here we demonstrate that the phase data obtained during MRgFUS for MR temperature imaging (MRTI) contains anatomic information that could be useful in guiding this procedure. This approach was evaluated in 68 thalamotomies for essential tremor (ET). We found that we could readily visualize the red nucleus and subthalamic nucleus, and those nuclei were c…
Parallel imaging techniques have been widely used in high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Multiple receiver coils have been shown to improve image quality and allow accelerated image acquisition. Magnetic resonance imaging at ultra-low fields (ULF MRI) is a new imaging approach that uses SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) sensors to measure the spatially encoded precession of pre-polarized nuclear spin populations at microtesla-range measurement fields. In this work, parallel imaging at microtesla fields is systematically studied for the first time. A seven-channel SQU…
Combining the unmatched soft-tissue imaging capabilities of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with high precision robotics has the potential to improve the accuracy, precision, and safety of a wide range of image-guided medical procedures. However, the goal of highly functional MRI-compatible robotic systems has not yet been realized because conventional electromagnetic servomotors used by medical robots can become dangerous projectiles near the strong magnetic field of an MRI scanner. Here we report a novel electromagnetic servomotor design that is constructed from non-magnetic components and …
We demonstrate an experimental method for direct 2D and 3D imaging of magnetic radio-frequency (rf) field distribution in metal-dielectric structures based on traveling wave (TW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at ultra-high field (> 7T). The typical apparatus would include an ultra-high field whole body or small bore MRI scanner, waveguide elements filled with MRI active dielectrics with predefined electric and magnetic properties, and TW rf transmit-receive probes. We validated the technique by obtaining TW magnetic-resonance (MR) images of the magnetic field distribution of the rf modes of…
Magnetic resonance imaging at ultra-low fields (ULF MRI) is a promising new imaging method that uses SQUID sensors to measure the spatially encoded precession of pre-polarized nuclear spin populations at a microtesla-range measurement field. In this work, a seven-channel SQUID system designed for simultaneous 3D ULF MRI and magnetoencephalography (MEG) is described. The system includes seven second-order SQUID gradiometers, characterized by magnetic field resolutions of 1.2 - 2.8 fT/rtHz. It is also equipped with five sets of coils for 3D Fourier imaging with pre-polarization. Essential techni…
Direct imaging of impressed dc currents inside the head can provide valuable conductivity information, possibly improving electro-magnetic neuroimaging. Ultra-low field magnetic resonance imaging (ULF MRI) at $μ$T Larmor fields can be utilized for current density imaging (CDI). Here, a measurable impact of the magnetic field $B_{J}$, generated by the impressed current density $J$, on the MR signal is probed using specialized sequences. In contrast to high-field MRI, the full tensor of $B_{J}$ can be derived without rotation of the subject in the scanner, due to a larger flexibility in the sequ…
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most flexible and powerful medical imaging modalities. This flexibility does however come at a cost; MRI images acquired at different sites and with different parameters exhibit significant differences in contrast and tissue appearance, resulting in downstream issues when quantifying brain anatomy or the presence of pathology. In this work, we propose to combine multiparametric MRI-based static-equation sequence simulations with segmentation convolutional neural networks (CNN), to make these networks robust to variations in acquisition parameters.…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used biomedical imaging modality that derives much of its contrast from microscale magnetic field gradients in biological tissues. However, the connection between these sub-voxel field patterns and MRI contrast has not been studied experimentally. Here, we describe a new method to map subcellular magnetic fields in mammalian cells and tissues using nitrogen vacancy diamond magnetometry and connect these maps to voxel-scale MRI contrast, providing insights for in vivo imaging and contrast agent design.
MultiModal Imaging is an innovative technique that consists in the combination of diagnostic exams based on different physical processes, to obtain a unique image with more detailed clinical information. The possibility of a simultaneous use of PET and MRI could be achieved by using a particular radioisotope: 52gMn. The main route to produce this isotope is the reaction 52Cr(p,n)52gMn which is theoretically investigated in this study by means of three nuclear reaction codes. An analysis of the cross sections and a computation of the production rates and time evolution of the produced radioisot…
The human lung and its functions are extremely sensitive to gravity, however the conventional high-field magnets used for most laser-polarized 3He MRI of the human lung restrict subjects to lying horizontally. Imaging of human lungs using inhaled laser-polarized 3He gas is demonstrated in an open-access very-low-magnetic-field (< 5 mT) MRI instrument. This prototype device employs a simple, low-cost electromagnet, with an open geometry that allows variation of the orientation of the imaging subject in a two-dimensional plane. As a demonstration, two-dimensional lung images were acquired with 4…
We present a design and the optimization of an irregular-shaped ring-pair magnet array that generates a 1D monotonic field pattern for 2D head imaging in a low-field portable MRI system. The magnet rings are discretized into fan-shaped ring segments with varying outer diameters for the design and optimization. Besides, the inner radii of ring-pairs are tapered from outside in to provide the controlled field inhomogeneity. Genetic algorithm (GA) was used, and a current model for a fan-shaped ring segment was derived to have a fast forward calculation in the optimization. A monotonic field patte…
Multi-shot echo planar imaging (msEPI) is a promising approach to achieve high in-plane resolution with high sampling efficiency and low T2* blurring. However, due to the geometric distortion, shot-to-shot phase variations and potential subject motion, msEPI continues to be a challenge in MRI. In this work, we introduce acquisition and reconstruction strategies for robust, high-quality msEPI without phase navigators. We propose Blip Up-Down Acquisition (BUDA) using interleaved blip-up and -down phase encoding, and incorporate B0 forward-modeling into Hankel structured low-rank model to enable …
Moving MRI: Imaging a moving body with a moving magnet
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital(阿蒂努拉·A·马丁诺斯生物医学成像中心,马萨诸塞州总医院);Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院放射系);SCAN Center, Stony Brook University(石溪大学扫描中心);Ohio State University College of Medicine(俄亥俄州立大学医学院)
In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), inhomogeneity in the main magnetic field used for imaging, referred to as off-resonance, can lead to image artifacts ranging from mild to severe depending on the application. Off-resonance artifacts, such as signal loss, geometric distortions, and blurring, can compromise the clinical and scientific utility of MR images. In this review, we describe sources of off-resonance in MRI, how off-resonance affects images, and strategies to prevent and correct for off-resonance. Given recent advances and the great potential of low field and/or portable MRI, we also …
Multisession Longitudinal Dynamic MRI Incorporating Patient-Specific Prior Image Information Across Time
New York University Grossman School of Medicine(纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院);Bernard and Irene Schwartz Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, New York University Grossman School of Medicine(纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院放射学系伯纳德和艾琳·施瓦茨生物医学成像中心);Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R), Department of Radiology, New York University Grossman School of Medicine(纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院放射学系先进成像创新与研究中心)
University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学);University of Toronto(多伦多大学);Sunnybrook Research Institute(桑尼布鲁克研究所)
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a crucial medical imaging technology for the screening and diagnosis of frequently occurring cancers. However image quality may suffer by long acquisition times for MRIs due to patient motion, as well as result in great patient discomfort. Reducing MRI acquisition time can reduce patient discomfort and as a result reduces motion artifacts from the acquisition process. Compressive sensing strategies, when applied to MRI, have been demonstrated to be effective at decreasing acquisition times significantly by sparsely sampling the \emph{k}-space during the acqu…
Enhancing and Accelerating Brain MRI through Deep Learning Reconstruction Using Prior Subject-Specific Imaging
Department of Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary(电气与软件工程系,卡尔加里大学);Departments of Radiology and Clinical Neuroscience, University of Calgary(放射学与临床神经科学系,卡尔加里大学);Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Calgary(生物医学工程系,卡尔加里大学);Department of Radiology, University Hospital Basel(放射学系,巴塞尔大学医院);Department of Neurology, University Hospital Basel(神经病学系,巴塞尔大学医院);Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary(霍奇基斯脑研究所,卡尔加里大学)
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a valuable tool in the assessment of tissue microstructure. By fitting a model to the dMRI signal it is possible to derive various quantitative features. Several of the most popular dMRI signal models are expansions in an appropriately chosen basis, where the coefficients are determined using some variation of least-squares. However, such approaches lack any notion of uncertainty, which could be valuable in e.g. group analyses. In this work, we use a probabilistic interpretation of linear least-squares methods to recast popular dMRI models as Bayesian ones. This makes i…
FastMRI Prostate: A Publicly Available, Biparametric MRI Dataset to Advance Machine Learning for Prostate Cancer Imaging
New York University Grossman School of Medicine(纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院);Siemens Medical Solutions USA(美国西门子医疗解决方案公司);Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University(纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所)
An Exploration of Parallel Imaging System for Very-low Field (50mT) MRI Scanner
National Center for Magnetic Resonance in Wuhan, State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院精密测量科学与技术创新研究院武汉物理与数学研究所磁共振国家中心、磁共振与原子分子物理国家重点实验室);The school of Electrical Engineering, Chongqing University(重庆大学电气工程学院);A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital(麻省总医院放射科A.A.马丁诺斯生物医学成像中心);Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);Shenzhen Academy of Aerospace Technology(深圳航天科技创新研究院);The school of Life Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University(西北大学生命科学学院);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学)
The introduction of neuroendoscopy, microneurosurgery, neuronavigation, and intraoperative imaging for surgical operations has made significant improvements over other traditionally invasive surgical techniques. The integration of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-driven surgical devices with intraoperative imaging and endoscopy can enable further advancements in surgical treatments and outcomes. This work proposes the design and development of an MRI-driven endoscope leveraging the high (3-7 T), external magnetic field of an MR scanner for heat-mitigated steering within the ventricular system …
Magnetic fields associated with currents flowing in tissue can be measured non-invasively by means of zero-field-encoded ultra-low-field magnetic resonance imaging (ULF MRI) enabling current density imaging (CDI) and possibly conductivity mapping of human head tissues. Since currents applied to a human are limited by safety regulations and only a small fraction of the current passes through the relatively high-resistive skull, a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) may be difficult to obtain when using this method. In this work, we study the relationship between the image SNR and the SNR of …
Discovering a new field is not usually an easy process, especially when you choose magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI is one of the few non-invasive medical procedures, if not the only one, that someone can receive in modern day hospitals. Its high sensitivity is a true prowess that is due to three things: subtle quantum physics, great engineering and clever imaging techniques from mathematics and computing science. However, the mathematics and physics of it are already daunting tasks by themselves, which makes MRI difficult to comprehend. This document paves a rather short, yet solid and l…
Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) poses unique challenges related to the speed of data acquisition and to the degree of undersampling necessary to achieve this speed. This Master's thesis introduces and evaluates two pre-processing approaches for these problems: Coil compression to reduce the data volume and a channel selection algorithm to reduce streak artifacts which arise as a consequence of undersampling. Both approaches are tested on real data covering anatomical imaging of the head and of the heart.
Magnetic resonance imaging at microtesla fields is a promising imaging method that combines the pre-polarization technique and broadband signal reception by SQUID sensors to enable in vivo MRI at microtesla-range magnetic fields. Despite significant advances, the potential of microtesla MRI for biomedical imaging is limited by its insufficient signal-to-noise ratio due to a relatively low sample polarization. Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is a widely used approach that allows polarization enhancement by two-four orders of magnitude without an increase in the polarizing field strength. In …
University College London(伦敦大学学院);University of Oulu(奥卢大学)
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in diagnosis, management and monitoring of many diseases. However, it is an inherently slow imaging technique. Over the last 20 years, parallel imaging, temporal encoding and compressed sensing have enabled substantial speed-ups in the acquisition of MRI data, by accurately recovering missing lines of k-space data. However, clinical uptake of vastly accelerated acquisitions has been limited, in particular in compressed sensing, due to the time-consuming nature of the reconstructions and unnatural looking images. Following the success of machi…
Dynamic Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a tissue perfusion imaging technique. Some versatile free-breathing DCE-MRI techniques combining compressed sensing (CS) and parallel imaging with golden-angle radial sampling have been developed to improve motion robustness with high spatial and temporal resolution. These methods have demonstrated good diagnostic performance in clinical setting, but the reconstruction quality will degrade at high acceleration rates and overall reconstruction time remains long. In this paper, we proposed a new parallel CS reconstruction model fo…
Over almost five decades of development and improvement, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become a rich and powerful, non-invasive technique in medical imaging, yet not reaching its physical limits. Technical and physiological restrictions constrain physically feasible developments. A common solution to improve imaging speed and resolution is to use higher field strengths, which also has subtle and potentially harmful implications. However, patient safety is to be considered utterly important at all stages of research and clinical routine. Here we show that dynamic metamaterials are a prom…
The fiber g-ratio is the ratio of the inner to the outer diameter of the myelin sheath of a myelinated axon. It has a limited dynamic range in healthy white matter, as it is optimized for speed of signal conduction, cellular energetics, and spatial constraints. In vivo imaging of the g-ratio in health and disease would greatly increase our knowledge of the nervous system and our ability to diagnose, monitor, and treat disease. MRI based g-ratio imaging was first conceived in 2011, and expanded to be feasible in full brain with preliminary results in 2013. This manuscript reviews the growing g-…
The spatial resolution of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is fundamentally limited by the width of Lorentzian point spread functions (PSF) associated with the exponential decay rate of transverse magnetization (1/T2*). Here we show a different contrast mechanism in MRI by establishing RASER (Radio-frequency Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in imaged media. RASER imaging bursts emerge out of noise and without applying (Radio Frequency) RF pulses when placing spins with sufficient population inversion in a weak magnetic field gradient. A small difference in initial population …