The main disadvantage of MRI is its long scan time, taking up to one hour at our institution. For children, MRI can be particularly frightening because of long scan times within a noisy and confined space that can increase anxiety and risk of motion artifacts in the acquired images. In cases of excessive motion, MRI sequences are often repeated, further increasing scan time, or requiring patient revisit to the MRI suite. Alternativel, general anesthesia (GA) is used - which reduces the overall patient comfort, safety, throughput, and adding to the cost of care. As a result of these major issues, there is an immediate need for a fast MRI protocol that parallels the diagnostic capacity of the standard MRI. The methods here will overcome a set of well-known problems with the use of fast imaging using Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) through the use of a family of `short axis EPI' motion-correctable MRI methods. The 5minute exam we will develop based on these methods will reduce the scan failure rate through a rapid non-sedated brain exam with high diagnostic quality - potentially leading to detecting abnormalities in patients who otherwise cannot be reliably scanned with MRI. By obviating the need for patient sedation, improving patient comfort and reducing the scan time by up to 35min per patient, we propose to dramatically increase patient throughput, comfort, reduce scan failure rate, and the cost of healthcare.
A significant disadvantage of MRI is that it is much slower compared to other imaging modalities; this increases the risk of motion artifacts in the acquired images, thus general anesthesia (GA) is often used - at the expense of patient throughput, safety, comfort, and cost. In this proposal we will develop and implement a fast motion- corrected 5minute exam for non-sedated pediatric MRI to improve patient throughput and eliminate need for sedation and GA.
| Terem, Itamar; Ni, Wendy W; Goubran, Maged et al. (2018) Revealing sub-voxel motions of brain tissue using phase-based amplified MRI (aMRI). Magn Reson Med 80:2549-2559 |
