| Popis: |
Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a clinical imaging modality that has excellent soft tissue contrast, enabling it to answer clinical questions on a range of pathologies that other imaging methods cannot. However, conventional MR techniques typically have slow acquisitions that prevent applications in imaging physiological motion. In addition, other imaging modalities such as CT produce quantitative, reproducible pixel values, whereas MRI generally produces qualitative images. To address these issues, many new MR techniques have been developed but require additional optimization or development to be adopted clinically. Three main projects involving the translation of emerging techniques in MR to clinical application will be described in this thesis. In the first project, a fast imaging technique known as through-time radial GRAPPA is optimized to reduce total acquisition time and reconstruction overhead to enable free-breathing un-gated cardiac CINE. The second project discusses a new quantitative imaging technique in the heart, known as Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (cMRF), which requires a lengthy dictionary simulation step to be performed with each reconstruction. cMRF dictionary simulation is implemented and optimized on a reconstruction platform known as Gadgetron to enable clinically integration of cMRF. In the final project, in-bore MR-guided prostate biopsy is an interventional technique that requires long T2-weighted imaging. A simulation approach taken to find a faster T2-weighted imaging sequence among Cartesian and spiral TSE sequence variants. |
