Minimum Redundancy Spatiotemporal MRI

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

0201876 Bresler Since its inception in the early 70's, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a premier diagnostic imaging tool. Although its early applications were largely limited to stationary objects, MRI has also proven extremely useful, in recent years, for dynamic imaging applications, such as cardiac, functional or interventional imaging. An important challenge confronting dynamic MRI (D-MRI) is obtaining both high spatial and high temporal resolutions. Over the last two decades, many fast imaging methods including fast-scan techniques, phased array RF coils for parallel acquisition, and reduced sampling of the data space have been developed. In spite of these advances in fast MRI, many applications are still critically dependent on additional speedups, and virtually all applications could benefit from them. Examples include 3D multiphase cardiac imaging, coronary angiography and plaque characterization, cardiac imaging without breath-holding, diffusion-tensor functional brain imaging, and interventional MRI with high tissue contrast and temporal resolution. The general goal of the proposed research is to develop, implement and test a new unified theoretical framework for minimum-redundancy D-MRI data acquisition and image reconstruction. In this framework, dynamic imaging is treated as a higher-dimensional image reconstruction problem, with time being an independent axis. Instead of attempting to freeze all motion by sufficiently fast acquisition, time variation during acquisition is explicitly accounted for in the steps of MRI sequence design, data acquisition, and image reconstruction. The approach will draw on and extend theories and algorithms introduced by the PIs over the past few years, which offer the potential for significant speedups of the imaging process. Furthermore, combination of the theory and techniques developed in this project with fast scan methods and with methods based on phased-array RF coils will produce combined speedups, greater than any one of the individual approaches.