ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: To perform multi-echo water/fat separated proton resonance frequency (PRF)-shift temperature mapping. METHODS: State-of-the-art, iterative multi-echo water/fat separation algorithms produce high-quality water and fat images in the absence of heating but are not suitable for real-time imaging due to their long compute times and potential errors in heated regions. Existing fat-referenced PRF-shift temperature reconstruction methods partially address these limitations but do not address motion or large time-varying and spatially inhomogeneous B0 shifts. We describe a model-based temperature reconstruction method that overcomes these limitations by fitting a library of separated water and fat images measured before heating directly to multi-echo data measured during heating, while accounting for the PRF shift with temperature. RESULTS: Simulations in a mixed water/fat phantom with focal heating showed that the proposed algorithm reconstructed more accurate temperature maps in mixed tissues compared to a fat-referenced thermometry method. In a porcine phantom experiment with focused ultrasound heating at 1.5 Tesla, temperature maps were accurate to within 1∘ C of fiber optic probe temperature measurements and were calculated in 0.47 s per time point. Free-breathing breast and liver imaging experiments demonstrated motion and off-resonance compensation. The algorithm can also accurately reconstruct water/fat separated temperature maps from a single echo during heating. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed model-based water/fat separated algorithm produces accurate PRF-shift temperature maps in mixed water and fat tissues in the presence of spatiotemporally varying off-resonance and motion.
Subject(s)
Adipose Tissue/chemistry , Liver/diagnostic imaging , Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods , Thermography/methods , Water/chemistry , Algorithms , Animals , Breast/diagnostic imaging , Computer Simulation , Female , Healthy Volunteers , Heating , Humans , Image Processing, Computer-Assisted/methods , Models, Statistical , Motion , Reproducibility of Results , Swine , Temperature , UltrasonographyABSTRACT
PURPOSE: To accelerate simulation of off-resonance artifacts in steady-state gradient echo MRI by using fast Fourier transforms and demonstrate its applicability to metal object localization. THEORY AND METHODS: By exploiting the repetitive nature of steady-state pulse sequences it is possible to use fast Fourier transforms to calculate the MR signal. Based on this principle, a method for fast simulation of off-resonance artifacts was designed. The method was validated against Bloch simulations and MRI scans. Its clinical relevance was demonstrated by employing it for template matching-based metal object localization, as applied to a titanium cylinder, an oxidized zirconium knee implant, and gold fiducials. RESULTS: The fast simulations were accurate compared with actual MRI scans of the objects. The differences between the fast simulations and Bloch simulations were minor, while the acceleration scaled linearly with the number of phase-encoding lines. The object localization method accurately localized the various metal objects. CONCLUSION: The proposed simulation methodology provided accurate 3D simulations of off-resonance artifacts with a lower computational complexity than Bloch simulations. The speed of the simulations opens up possibilities in image reconstructions involving off-resonance phenomena that were previously infeasible due to computational limitations, as demonstrated for metal object localization. Magn Reson Med 78:2035-2041, 2017. © 2016 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
