This project outlines technical bioengineering development for high resolution liver imaging at ultrahigh field in diagnosing fatty liver disease. Preliminary research in this field is extremely promising by using in-phase and opposed-phase images at 1.5 Tesla. And preliminary human liver images at ultrahigh field of 7 Tesla have been achieved at UCSF. This """"""""Pathway to Independence"""""""" award application includes a mentored career development plan for transition of the candidate, Dr. Yong Pang, into an independent investigator, as well an accompanying research plan describing the proposed technical developments for high resolution in-vivo imaging of human liver at ultrahigh field. The candidate, Dr. Yong Pang, is currently Postdoctoral Research Scholar at UCSF working on technical developments of RF coil array, parallel transmission and parallel imaging at 7 Tesla. His graduate work was focused on improving excitation accuracy and reducing power deposition using goal-oriented two-dimensional RF pulse, and compensating mutual coupling for parallel transmission. The mentoring and career development plan will supplement his engineering background with valuable exposure to human abdominal anatomy, biochemistry, clinical research design, clinical data analysis, and inter-disciplinary collaboration to facilitate the transition to an independent bioengineering investigator. His goals are to become a faculty member in bioengineering or radiology where he can research technical biomedical imaging developments with potential clinical applications. Ultrahigh field potentially provides high signal to noise ratio. However human liver imaging is subject to conducting effect, motion artifacts and RF field variation, especially with the increase of the field strength. Transferring human liver imaging techniques to ultrahigh field requires special methods, including RF coil, RF pulse and imaging sequence design. This project proposes high efficiency transceiver RF coil array and parallel imaging compressed sensing on time-optimal sparse k-space trajectory for high resolution multislice liver imaging within short time. Preclinical studies in healthy volunteers an volunteers with fatty liver disease will be used for investigation of the new imaging techniques. This will facilitate the translation of the methods from development to future clinical application
MRI has become one of the most promising noninvasive methods in evaluating the liver under normal and diseased conditions, and has been used for diagnosing fatty liver diseases. The new in-vivo imaging methods at ultrahigh field proposed in this project will provide unprecedented high resolution to improve human liver imaging and potentially enable new clinical applications.
