Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationCine phase contrast (PC) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful imaging technique that allows for the quantitative measurement of in-vivo blood velocities over the cardiac cycle. Velocity information can be used to diagnose and learn more about the mechanisms of cardio-vascular disease. Compared to other velocity measuring techniques, PC MRI provides high-resolution 2D and 3D spatial velocity information. Unfortunately, as with many other MRI techniques, PC MRI su ers from long acquisition times which places constraints on temporal and spatial resolution. This dissertation outlines the use of temporally constrained reconstruction (TCR) of radial PC data in order to signi cantly reduce the acquisition time so that higher temporal and spatial resolutions can be achieved. A golden angle-based acquisition scheme and a novel self-gating method were used in order to allow for exible selection of temporal resolution and to ameliorate the di culties associated with external electrocardiogram (ECG) gating. Finally, image reconstruction times for TCR are signi cantly reduced by implementation on a high-performance computer cluster. The TCR algorithm is executed in parallel across multiple GPUs achieving a 50 second reconstruction time for a very large cardiac perfusion data set

Projection Postulate and Atomic Quantum Zeno Effect

The projection postulate has been used to predict a slow-down of the time evolution of the state of a system under rapidly repeated measurements, and ultimately a freezing of the state. To test this so-called quantum Zeno effect an experiment was performed by Itano et al. (Phys. Rev. A 41, 2295 (1990)) in which an atomic-level measurement was realized by means of a short laser pulse. The relevance of the results has given rise to controversies in the literature. In particular the projection postulate and its applicability in this experiment have been cast into doubt. In this paper we show analytically that for a wide range of parameters such a short laser pulse acts as an effective level measurement to which the usual projection postulate applies with high accuracy. The corrections to the ideal reductions and their accumulation over n pulses are calculated. Our conclusion is that the projection postulate is an excellent pragmatic tool for a quick and simple understanding of the slow-down of time evolution in experiments of this type. However, corrections have to be included, and an actual freezing does not seem possible because of the finite duration of measurements.Comment: 25 pages, LaTeX, no figures; to appear in Phys. Rev.