This work aims for rapid, robust pediatric body MRI. MRI is an excellent tool for diagnosis and monitoring of pediatric disease, offering superb soft tissue contrast and high anatomic resolution;unlike computed tomography (CT), particularly attractive is the lack of ionizing radiation, given the increased risk of children to radiation-induced cancer. However, the impact of MRI in children is limited by (1) lack of robustness from the technical demands and low signal to noise ratio (SNR) of imaging small moving structures in an often uncooperative patient, (2) long exams that limit access, cause motion artifacts, and often require anesthesia with attendant risk, and (3) research and development mostly focused on adults. Thus, children often lack the benefits of cross-sectional imaging altogether or are exposed to ionizing radiation. Approach: This work will (1) increase SNR by developing high-density 3 Tesla receive coils optimized for children and (2) incorporate new k-space sampling strategies, advanced motion correction techniques, and novel non-linear parallel imaging reconstruction methods to reduce image reconstruction failure and motion artifacts, thereby increasing robustness. These two developments will enable a third development, (3) compressed sensing, which enables a further increase in imaging speed by exploiting image sparsity to undersample data without causing image artifacts. The three approaches will synergize for dramatic speed, resolution, and anatomic coverage improvements. Experiments will assess (1) SNR gains of a dedicated pediatric coil, (2) image quality of standard acceleration methods versus parallel imaging enhanced with incoherent sampling, pseudorandom ordering, motion- correction, and nonlinear reconstruction, (3) diagnostic equivalence between parallel imaging alone and further accelerated imaging from combined parallel imaging and compressed sensing, and (4) the ability of these methods to reduce anesthesia for pediatric MRI. Significance: This work will lead to fast, robust, broadly-applicable pediatric body MRI protocols with less anesthesia, making MRI safer, cheaper, and more available to children, transforming it into a workhorse modality and decreasing CT radiation burden. The techniques will demand less MRI operator skill, facilitating wide application in the community setting. Finally, faster imaging and motion compensation will permit new MRI applications, for both pediatric and adult disease.
Pediatric body MRI poses unique challenges of imaging small moving anatomic structures without patient cooperation, resulting in a need for anesthesia, long exam times, and lack of robustness. We will exploit synergies of high field strength, high density receive coils, new motion correction strategies, and novel imaging acceleration methods to dramatically improve image quality and speed. This work will ultimately enable more body MRI exams to be performed robustly without sedation or anesthesia, thus increasing MRI safety and availability and decreasing the dose of ionizing radiation from CT to a particularly vulnerable population.
| Gibbons, Eric K; Vasanawala, Shreyas S; Pauly, John M et al. (2018) Body diffusion-weighted imaging using magnetization prepared single-shot fast spin echo and extended parallel imaging signal averaging. Magn Reson Med 79:3032-3044 |
| Yoruk, Umit; Hargreaves, Brian A; Vasanawala, Shreyas S (2018) Automatic renal segmentation for MR urography using 3D-GrabCut and random forests. Magn Reson Med 79:1696-1707 |
| Ong, Frank; Cheng, Joseph Y; Lustig, Michael (2018) General phase regularized reconstruction using phase cycling. Magn Reson Med 80:112-125 |
| Gibbons, Eric K; Le Roux, Patrick; Pauly, John M et al. (2018) Slice profile effects on nCPMG SS-FSE. Magn Reson Med 79:430-438 |
| Chen, Feiyu; Taviani, Valentina; Malkiel, Itzik et al. (2018) Variable-Density Single-Shot Fast Spin-Echo MRI with Deep Learning Reconstruction by Using Variational Networks. Radiology 289:366-373 |
| Gibbons, Eric K; Le Roux, Patrick; Vasanawala, Shreyas S et al. (2018) Robust Self-Calibrating nCPMG Acquisition: Application to Body Diffusion-Weighted Imaging. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 37:200-209 |
| Zucker, Evan J; Cheng, Joseph Y; Haldipur, Anshul et al. (2018) Free-breathing pediatric chest MRI: Performance of self-navigated golden-angle ordered conical ultrashort echo time acquisition. J Magn Reson Imaging 47:200-209 |
| Chen, Feiyu; Zhang, Tao; Cheng, Joseph Y et al. (2017) Autocalibrating motion-corrected wave-encoding for highly accelerated free-breathing abdominal MRI. Magn Reson Med 78:1757-1766 |
| Tamir, Jonathan I; Uecker, Martin; Chen, Weitian et al. (2017) T2 shuffling: Sharp, multicontrast, volumetric fast spin-echo imaging. Magn Reson Med 77:180-195 |
| Lai, Lillian M; Cheng, Joseph Y; Alley, Marcus T et al. (2017) Feasibility of ferumoxytol-enhanced neonatal and young infant cardiac MRI without general anesthesia. J Magn Reson Imaging 45:1407-1418 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 53 publications
