Development of high-performance low field MRI technology

National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

In FY25, we have developed the following improvements to our 0.55T imaging for cardiac and pulmonary applications: Cardiac applications: • We extended our approach of patient-tailored scanning to implement an automatic pre-calibration of flow velocity to improve the quality and efficiency of cardiac flow measurements • We collaborated with Dana Peters’ lab at Yale university on an improved cardiac flow sequence for 0.55T (bSSFP phase contrast) • We extended our work on cardiopulmonary 3D imaging with a new dynamic acquisition and dual image reconstruction approach Pulmonary applications: • We implemented free-breathing oxygen enhancement techniques and demonstrated a novel analysis pipeline to simultaneously map ventilation and regional oxygen uptake in the lungs. • We implemented a computational approach called “coil sketching” to reduce the computational burden of our 3D+time image pulmonary image reconstructions such that they can be deployed on consumer-grade GPUs Fundamental technology development: • We developed deep-learning models for spiral image reconstruction and applied them for cardiac imaging • We continued our work on image denoising based on deep-learning approaches • We developed and assessed a custom method for multi-nuclear imaging on our 0.55T system. This work was in collaboration with Natalia Gudino in NINDS and Dursun Korel Yildirim in NHLBI. Patient demonstrations: • We translated our lung water imaging approaches to two major medical centers. • We continued to perform research cardiac MRI scans on patients referred for clinical cardiac MRI exams. We collaborated with Patricia Bandettini to recruit patients and assess clinical utility of imaging. • We continued to perform research lung MRI scans on NHLBI patients, such as patients with LAM in collaboration with Joel Moss. The work of our lab has been selected for conference prizes, young investigator awards and journal front covers. This project includes close collaboration with industry to translate our developments and make them accessible to other institutions.