Advanced H-1 Lung Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the widely used medical imaging modality, since it can provide both structural and functional assessment in a single imaging session. However, two major challenges should be considered by using MRI for lung imaging. The first challenge is the intrinsic low SNR of H-1 lung MRI due to the low proton density as well as the fast decay of the lung parenchyma signal. And the second challenge is subject motion. To achieve high resolution structural image, MRI requires a long scan time, usually a few minutes or even longer, which make MRI sensitive to subject motion. To address the first challenge, ultra-short echo time (UTE) MRI sequence is used to capture the lung parenchyma signal before decay. As for subject motion, two major strategies are widely used. One strategy is fast breath-holding scan, the subjects are asked to hold their breaths for a short duration, and the fast 3D MR sequence would be used to acquire data within that duration. This dissertation proposes a new acquisition scheme based on the standard UTE sequence, which largely increases the encoding efficiency and improves the breath-holding scan images. The other is free breathing scan with motion correction. The subjects are allowed to breathe during the MR acquisition. After the acquisition, the motion corrupted data would go through the motion correction step to reconstruct the motion free images. In this dissertation, two novel motion corrected reconstruction strategies are proposed to incorporate the motion modeling and compensation into the reconstruction to get high SNR motion corrected 3D and 4D images. When translating the developed techniques to the clinical studies, specifically for pediatric and neonatal studies, more practical problems need to be considered, such as smaller but finer anatomy to image, the different respiratory patterns of the young subjects etc. This dissertation proposes a 5-minute free breathing UTE MRI strategy to achieve a 3D high resolution motion free lung image for pediatric and neonatal studies

Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Feasibility of automated 3-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging pancreas segmentation.

PurposeWith the advent of MR guided radiotherapy, internal organ motion can be imaged simultaneously during treatment. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of pancreas MRI segmentation using state-of-the-art segmentation methods.Methods and materialT2 weighted HASTE and T1 weighted VIBE images were acquired on 3 patients and 2 healthy volunteers for a total of 12 imaging volumes. A novel dictionary learning (DL) method was used to segment the pancreas and compared to t mean-shift merging (MSM), distance regularized level set (DRLS), graph cuts (GC) and the segmentation results were compared to manual contours using Dice's index (DI), Hausdorff distance and shift of the-center-of-the-organ (SHIFT).ResultsAll VIBE images were successfully segmented by at least one of the auto-segmentation method with DI >0.83 and SHIFT ≤2 mm using the best automated segmentation method. The automated segmentation error of HASTE images was significantly greater. DL is statistically superior to the other methods in Dice's overlapping index. For the Hausdorff distance and SHIFT measurement, DRLS and DL performed slightly superior to the GC method, and substantially superior to MSM. DL required least human supervision and was faster to compute.ConclusionOur study demonstrated potential feasibility of automated segmentation of the pancreas on MRI images with minimal human supervision at the beginning of imaging acquisition. The achieved accuracy is promising for organ localization

Machine learning in Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Image reconstruction.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in diagnosis, management and monitoring of many diseases. However, it is an inherently slow imaging technique. Over the last 20 years, parallel imaging, temporal encoding and compressed sensing have enabled substantial speed-ups in the acquisition of MRI data, by accurately recovering missing lines of k-space data. However, clinical uptake of vastly accelerated acquisitions has been limited, in particular in compressed sensing, due to the time-consuming nature of the reconstructions and unnatural looking images. Following the success of machine learning in a wide range of imaging tasks, there has been a recent explosion in the use of machine learning in the field of MRI image reconstruction. A wide range of approaches have been proposed, which can be applied in k-space and/or image-space. Promising results have been demonstrated from a range of methods, enabling natural looking images and rapid computation. In this review article we summarize the current machine learning approaches used in MRI reconstruction, discuss their drawbacks, clinical applications, and current trends

Accelerated partial separable model using dimension-reduced optimization technique for ultra-fast cardiac MRI

Objective. Imaging dynamic object with high temporal resolution is challenging in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Partial separable (PS) model was proposed to improve the imaging quality by reducing the degrees of freedom of the inverse problem. However, PS model still suffers from long acquisition time and even longer reconstruction time. The main objective of this study is to accelerate the PS model, shorten the time required for acquisition and reconstruction, and maintain good image quality simultaneously. Approach. We proposed to fully exploit the dimension reduction property of the PS model, which means implementing the optimization algorithm in subspace. We optimized the data consistency term, and used a Tikhonov regularization term based on the Frobenius norm of temporal difference. The proposed dimension-reduced optimization technique was validated in free-running cardiac MRI. We have performed both retrospective experiments on public dataset and prospective experiments on in-vivo data. The proposed method was compared with four competing algorithms based on PS model, and two non-PS model methods. Main results. The proposed method has robust performance against shortened acquisition time or suboptimal hyper-parameter settings, and achieves superior image quality over all other competing algorithms. The proposed method is 20-fold faster than the widely accepted PS+Sparse method, enabling image reconstruction to be finished in just a few seconds. Significance. Accelerated PS model has the potential to save much time for clinical dynamic MRI examination, and is promising for real-time MRI applications.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures. Accepted as manuscript on Physics in Medicine & Biolog

Enhancing Compressed Sensing 4D Photoacoustic Tomography by Simultaneous Motion Estimation

A crucial limitation of current high-resolution 3D photoacoustic tomography (PAT) devices that employ sequential scanning is their long acquisition time. In previous work, we demonstrated how to use compressed sensing techniques to improve upon this: images with good spatial resolution and contrast can be obtained from suitably sub-sampled PAT data acquired by novel acoustic scanning systems if sparsity-constrained image reconstruction techniques such as total variation regularization are used. Now, we show how a further increase of image quality can be achieved for imaging dynamic processes in living tissue (4D PAT). The key idea is to exploit the additional temporal redundancy of the data by coupling the previously used spatial image reconstruction models with sparsity-constrained motion estimation models. While simulated data from a two-dimensional numerical phantom will be used to illustrate the main properties of this recently developed joint-image-reconstruction-and-motion-estimation framework, measured data from a dynamic experimental phantom will also be used to demonstrate their potential for challenging, large-scale, real-world, three-dimensional scenarios. The latter only becomes feasible if a carefully designed combination of tailored optimization schemes is employed, which we describe and examine in more detail