Tailored magnetic resonance fingerprinting

Pavan Poojar; Enlin Qian; Tiago T Fernandes; Rita G Nunes; Maggie Fung; Patrick Quarterman; Sachin R Jambawalikar; Angela Lignelli; Sairam Geethanath

doi:10.1016/j.mri.2023.02.002

Tailored magnetic resonance fingerprinting

Magn Reson Imaging. 2023 Jun:99:81-90. doi: 10.1016/j.mri.2023.02.002. Epub 2023 Feb 9.

Authors

Pavan Poojar¹, Enlin Qian², Tiago T Fernandes³, Rita G Nunes³, Maggie Fung⁴, Patrick Quarterman⁴, Sachin R Jambawalikar⁵, Angela Lignelli⁵, Sairam Geethanath⁶

Affiliations

¹ Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, New York, NY, USA; Columbia Magnetic Resonance Research Center, Columbia University in the city of New York, NY, USA.
² Columbia Magnetic Resonance Research Center, Columbia University in the city of New York, NY, USA.
³ Institute for Systems and Robotics and Department of Bioengineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
⁴ GE Healthcare Applied Sciences Laboratory East, New York, NY, USA.
⁵ Department of Radiology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Columbia University in the city of New York, NY, USA.
⁶ Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, New York, NY, USA; Columbia Magnetic Resonance Research Center, Columbia University in the city of New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: sairam.geethanath@columbia.edu.

PMID: 36764630
DOI: 10.1016/j.mri.2023.02.002

Abstract

Neuroimaging of certain pathologies requires both multi-parametric qualitative and quantitative imaging. The role of the quantitative MRI (qMRI) is well accepted but suffers from long acquisition times leading to patient discomfort, especially in geriatric and pediatric patients. Previous studies show that synthetic MRI can be used in order to reduce the scan time and provide qMRI as well as multi-contrast data. However, this approach suffers from artifacts such as partial volume and flow. In order to increase the scan efficiency (the number of contrasts and quantitative maps acquired per unit time), we designed, simulated, and demonstrated rapid, simultaneous, multi-contrast qualitative (T₁ weighted, T₁ fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), T₂ weighted, water, and fat), and quantitative imaging (T₁ and T₂ maps) through the approach of tailored MR fingerprinting (TMRF) to cover whole-brain in approximately four minutes. We performed TMRF on in vivo four healthy human brains and in vitro ISMRM/NIST phantom and compared with vendor supplied gold standard (GS) and MRF sequences. All scans were performed on a 3 T GE Premier system and images were reconstructed offline using MATLAB. The reconstructed qualitative images were then subjected to custom DL denoising and gradient anisotropic diffusion denoising. The quantitative tissue parametric maps were reconstructed using a dense neural network to gain computational speed compared to dictionary matching. The grey matter and white matter tissues in qualitative and quantitative data for the in vivo datasets were segmented semi-automatically. The SNR and mean contrasts were plotted and compared across all three methods. The GS images show better SNR in all four subjects compared to MRF and TMRF (GS > TMRF>MRF). The T₁ and T₂ values of MRF are relatively overestimated as compared to GS and TMRF. The scan efficiency for TMRF is 1.72 min^-1 which is higher compared to GS (0.32 min^-1) and MRF (0.90 min^-1).

Keywords: Brain imaging; MR fingerprinting; Multi contrast imaging; Qualitative and quantitative imaging; Rapid imaging; Synthetic MRI.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Aged
Brain*
Child
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
Magnetic Resonance Imaging* / methods
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
Neuroimaging
Phantoms, Imaging