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Keywords: Image acquisition: Quantification

This lecture will provide an overview of the latest advances in MRI techniques that enable quantification of tissue properties.  Specific topics that will be covered include approaches for fast quantitative imaging and techniques that aim at improving the accuracy of QMRI. Remaining challenges in quantitative MRI will be briefly discussed as well as potential new research directions.

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Alessandra Maiuro^1,2, Francesca Di Stadio², Serena Satta³, Giorgia Perniola⁴, Innocenza Palaia⁴, Angelina Pernazza³, Carlo Della Rocca³, Carlo Catalano³, Lucia Manganaro³, and Silvia Capuani^1,2
1Physics, CNR Institute for Complex Systems (ISC), Rome, Italy, ²Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, ³Radiological, Oncological and Pathological Sciences, Umberto I Hospital, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, ⁴Maternal and Child Health and Urological Sciences, Umberto I Hospital, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Keywords: Pelvis, Cancer, Pelvis, Endometrium, Endometrial cancer, IVIM, Kurtosis

To ameliorate the Endometrial cancer (EC) diagnosis and prognosis, IVIM and KURTOSIS models were used to elaborate DWIs obtained from 18 with EC and 20 healthy women. The b-values were 0,30,50,150,500,800,1000,1500,2000,2500s/mm2. DWIs were noise-corrected considering a homomorphic approach. For each EC subject, ROI in the tumor (T) and peritumoral (PT) area were analysed and endometrial area in healthy (H) subjects was also obtained. IVIM and Kurtosis parameters were quantified. K, which quantifies tissue’s complexity, is significantly higher in T and PT than in H. f is higher in PT compared to the other areas, highlighting the perfusive nature of EC. 

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Shihui Chen¹ and Hing-Chiu Chang^1,2
1The Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, ²Multi-scale Medical Robotics Center, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Keywords: Image Reconstruction, Diffusion/other diffusion imaging techniques, high b-value diffusion weighted imaging, multi-shot diffusion-weighted imaging

High b-value DWI is promising in detection of white matter pathology and infarctions. However, the disadvantages of the acquired high b-value DWI, such as insufficient SNR and image distortions, prohibits its clinical application. Though the feasibility of computed high b-value has been estimated in prostate cancer, the parameters derived from low b-value images cannot be used for diffusion kurtosis model fitting and achieved inferior performance at high b-value. In this study, we proposed a framework based on parametric POCSMUSE and kurtosis model to generate multiple high b-value images with comparable image quality to MUSE from highly-accelerated high b-value DWI.

Chiara Casella¹, Katy Vecchiato^1,2, Daniel Cromb¹, Yourong Guo¹, Emer Hughes¹, Louise Dillon¹, Elaine Green¹, Kathleen Colford¹, Anthony Price¹, Lucilio Cordero Grande^3,4,5,6, Tobias C. Wood⁷, Shaihan Malik³, Rui Pedro A. G. Teixeira³, David W. Carmichael³, and Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh^1,2,8
1Centre for the Developing Brain, School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom, ²Department for Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom, ³Department of Biomedical Engineering, King's College London, London, United Kingdom, ⁴Biomedical Image Technologies, ETSI Telecomunicación, Madrid, Spain, ⁵Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, ⁶Biomedical Research Networking Center in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN), Madrid, Spain, ⁷Department of Neuroimaging, King's College London, London, United Kingdom, ⁸MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, London, United Kingdom

Keywords: Epilepsy, Relaxometry, Paediatric

We assessed cortical microstructure in children with drug-resistant focal epilepsy using T1 and T2 relaxometry (qT1 and qT2). We show widespread, depth-mediated qT1 and qT2 increases, and alterations in intracortical organisation in patients. Changes did not correlate with clinical parameters, suggesting that they may be independent of disease severity. Using a random forest algorithm, we also show that qT1 and qT2 surface-features from patients with radiologically defined abnormalities (MRI-positive) and controls, can classify patients without reported radiological abnormalities (MRI-negative). This suggests a common imaging endophenotype of focal epilepsy irrespective of visible abnormalities that may be present at a pre-symptomatic disease-stage.

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Yudu Li^1,2, Rong Guo^1,3, Yibo Zhao^1,4, Wen Jin^1,4, Chao Ma^5,6, Shirui Luo², Georges El Fakhri^5,6, Yao Li⁷, Maria Jaromin², Volodymyr Kindratenko^2,4, Brad Sutton^1,2,8,9, and Zhi-Pei Liang^1,2,4
1Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States, ²National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States, ³Siemens Medical Solutions, Urbana, IL, United States, ⁴Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States, ⁵Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ⁶Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ⁷School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, ⁸Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States, ⁹Carle Illinois College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States

Keywords: Quantitative Imaging, Quantitative Imaging

MR spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) without water suppression provides a unique opportunity to use the unsuppressed water spectroscopic signals for T₁ and T₂ mapping. This work presents a new image reconstruction method for reconstructing the T₁/T₂ maps from the highly sparse MRSI data. This method uses a novel generalized series-assisted low-rank tensor model to absorb the high-quality reference MRSI images to constrain the spatial-spectral-parametric variations. Experimental results demonstrated very encouraging reconstruction performance.

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Zhen Ren¹, Federico D. Pineda², Frederick M. Howard³, Hiroyuki Abe¹, Kirti Kulkarni¹, Rita Nanda³, Nora T. Jaskowiak⁴, and Gregory S. Karczmar^1
1Department of Radiology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States, ²Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, United States, ³Department of Medicine - Section of Hematology/Oncology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States, ⁴Department of Surgery, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States

Keywords: Breast, Cancer, HER2-positive breast cancer

We retrospectively reviewed data from 28 patients with HER2-positive breast cancer treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) who underwent a protocol that included ultrafast DCE-MRI (temporal resolution = 3 – 9 seconds) for the first minute after contrast administration prior to NAC. We measured quantitative kinetic background parenchymal enhancement parameters (kBPEs) from ipsi- and contra-lateral normal parenchyma separately to quantify bilateral parenchymal enhancement asymmetry. The results show that HER2-positive patients with similar pre-NAC $$$K^{trans}$$$ in ipsi-and contralateral normal parenchyma were more likely to achieve pathologic complete response post NAC.

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Natalia V Korobova¹, Susanne S Rauh², Marian A Troelstra¹, Matthew R Orton³, Eric M. Schrauben¹, Oliver Maier⁴, Aart J Nederveen¹, and Oliver J Gurney-Champion^1
1Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Amsterdam University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, ²Department of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, Amsterdam University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, ³Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging, The Institute of Cancer Research, London, United Kingdom, ⁴Institute of Medical Engineering, Technical University Graz, Graz, Austria

Keywords: Contrast Agent, Quantitative Imaging, Model-based reconstruction

Dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI is a minimally invasive technique that is able  to quantitatively investigate the tumor vasculature microenvironment. Such information shows great potential for treatment stratification and response monitoring. However, DCE typically suffers from low spatial resolution, Rician noise bias, and errors due to complex perfusion modeling. Model-based reconstruction, in which DCE parameters are estimated directly from k-space, may overcome these shortcomings. In this study, we implemented model-based reconstruction for DCE-MRI data, validated it in simulations, and showed its performance in-vivo. With model-based reconstruction the estimated parameter maps exhibited less noise and preserved more anatomical details.

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Anna Lebret¹, Simon Lévy², Nikolai Pfender¹, Mazda Farshad³, Virginie Callot^4,5, Armin Curt¹, Patrick Freund^1,6, and Maryam Seif^1,6
1Spinal Cord Injury Center, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, ²MR Research Collaborations, Siemens Healthcare Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia, ³Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, ⁴Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, CRMBM, Marseille, France, ⁵APHM, Hôpital Universitaire Timone, CEMEREM, Marseille, France, ⁶Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Keywords: Spinal Cord, Neurodegeneration, Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy

Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is the most common form of non-traumatic spinal cord injury, mainly caused by chronic cervical cord compression. Impaired spinal cord perfusion is a central pathophysiological tenet in DCM patients. This study aims at investigating non-invasively DCM-induced changes of blood perfusion in the spinal cord above a cervical myelopathy using quantitative MRI techniques. Cardiac-gated intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) 3T MRI, sensitive to perfusion, was applied to the cervical cord (C1-C3) in 25 DCM patients and 27 healthy controls. DCM showed tissue-specific perfusion impairment. IVIM maps suggested remote hemodynamic deficit induced by cervical cord compression in DCM.

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Jiechao Wang¹, Wenhua Geng¹, Jian Wu¹, Taishan Kang², Zhigang Wu³, Jianzhong Lin², Congbo Cai¹, and Shuhui Cai^1
1Department of Electronic Science, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Plasma and Magnetic Resonance, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China, ²Department of Radiology, Zhongshan Hospital of Xiamen University, School of Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China, ³Clinical & Technical Solutions, Philips Healthcare, Shenzhen, China

Keywords: Quantitative Imaging, Diffusion/other diffusion imaging techniques

A synthetic data-driven physics-informed network (SDDPI-Net) was proposed for intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) mapping based on highly under-sampled diffusion-weighted turbo spin echo PROPELLER (DW-TSE-PROPELLER) data. This reconstruction network directly estimated distortion-free and artifacts-free IVIM parameters by explored data redundancy in the k-b space and IVIM bi-exponential model with synthetic training data. The results of human brain experiments show that our method can significantly improve the accuracy of IVIM maps with 6´ under-sampled DW-TSE-PROPELLER than other methods.

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Octavia Bane^1,2, Efe Ozkaya^1,2, Paul Kennedy^1,2, Aaron Fischman¹, Swan Thung³, and Bachir Taouli^1,2
1Department of Diagnostic, Molecular and Interventional Radiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States, ²BioMedical Engineering and Imaging Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States, ³Department of Pathology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States

Keywords: Liver, Quantitative Imaging, Portal Hypertension, Clinically Significant Portal Hypertension

In this prospective study, we explored the diagnostic value of MR elastography (MRE) as well as T₁-pre and post-gadoxetate contrast at the hepatobiliary phase and T_1ρ mapping of the liver and spleen for noninvasive diagnosis of clinically significant portal hypertension (CSPH) in patients with liver disease. 2D MRE liver (r=0.457, p<0.001) and spleen stiffness (r=0.438, p<0.001) showed a strong significant correlation with portal pressure measurement based on hepatic venous pressure gradient (HVPG).  2D MRE spleen stiffness outperformed other imaging parameters for prediction of CSPH [AUC = 0.867 (0.764-0.970)].

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Timoteo I. Delgado^1,2, Sevgi Gokce Kafali^1,3, Shu-Fu Shih^1,3, Timothy R. Adamos⁴, Shahnaz Ghahremani¹, Kara L. Calkins⁵, Xiaodong Zhong⁶, Vibhas Deshpande⁷, Bradley D. Bolster Jr.⁸, and Holden H. Wu^1,2,3
1Radiological Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ²Physics and Biology in Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ³Bioengineering, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ⁴Gastroenterology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ⁵Pediatrics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ⁶Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Los Angeles, CA, United States, ⁷Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Austin, TX, United States, ⁸Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT, United States

Keywords: Motion Correction, Liver

Previous work has proposed self-navigated golden-angle (GA) radial free-breathing (FB) MR elastography (MRE) of the liver. This work employed a standard DC-based motion compensation framework that proved suboptimal. Here we propose an image-space based motion-compensation framework for 2D free-breathing radial MRE. The proposed method is compared to the standard DC-based method by measuring the signal-to-noise (SNR) after self-navigated motion-compensation by each method (8 subjects). The median (interquartile range) SNR across subjects was 4.8 (3.6-5.7) and 6.8 (6.3-7.5) for the standard and proposed methods, respectively. Inclusion of image-space data may allow for more robust motion compensation for 2D radial axial acquisitions.