MRI-Only Based Radiotherapy Treatment Planning for the Rat Brain on a Small Animal Radiation Research Platform (SARRP).

Computed tomography (CT) is the standard imaging modality in radiation therapy treatment planning (RTP). However, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging provides superior soft tissue contrast, increasing the precision of target volume selection. We present MR-only based RTP for a rat brain on a small animal radiation research platform (SARRP) using probabilistic voxel classification with multiple MR sequences. Six rat heads were imaged, each with one CT and five MR sequences. The MR sequences were: T1-weighted, T2-weighted, zero-echo time (ZTE), and two ultra-short echo time sequences with 20 µs (UTE1) and 2 ms (UTE2) echo times. CT data were manually segmented into air, soft tissue, and bone to obtain the RTP reference. Bias field corrected MR images were automatically segmented into the same tissue classes using a fuzzy c-means segmentation algorithm with multiple images as input. Similarities between segmented CT and automatic segmented MR (ASMR) images were evaluated using Dice coefficient. Three ASMR images with high similarity index were used for further RTP. Three beam arrangements were investigated. Dose distributions were compared by analysing dose volume histograms. The highest Dice coefficients were obtained for the ZTE-UTE2 combination and for the T1-UTE1-T2 combination when ZTE was unavailable. Both combinations, along with UTE1-UTE2, often used to generate ASMR images, were used for further RTP. Using 1 beam, MR based RTP underestimated the dose to be delivered to the target (range: 1.4%-7.6%). When more complex beam configurations were used, the calculated dose using the ZTE-UTE2 combination was the most accurate, with 0.7% deviation from CT, compared to 0.8% for T1-UTE1-T2 and 1.7% for UTE1-UTE2. The presented MR-only based workflow for RTP on a SARRP enables both accurate organ delineation and dose calculations using multiple MR sequences. This method can be useful in longitudinal studies where CT's cumulative radiation dose might contribute to the total dose.

Automatic high-bandwidth calibration and reconstruction of arbitrarily sampled parallel MRI.

Today, many MRI reconstruction techniques exist for undersampled MRI data. Regularization-based techniques inspired by compressed sensing allow for the reconstruction of undersampled data that would lead to an ill-posed reconstruction problem. Parallel imaging enables the reconstruction of MRI images from undersampled multi-coil data that leads to a well-posed reconstruction problem. Autocalibrating pMRI techniques encompass pMRI techniques where no explicit knowledge of the coil sensivities is required. A first purpose of this paper is to derive a novel autocalibration approach for pMRI that allows for the estimation and use of smooth, but high-bandwidth coil profiles instead of a compactly supported kernel. These high-bandwidth models adhere more accurately to the physics of an antenna system. The second purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of a parameter-free reconstruction algorithm that combines autocalibrating pMRI and compressed sensing. Therefore, we present several techniques for automatic parameter estimation in MRI reconstruction. Experiments show that a higher reconstruction accuracy can be had using high-bandwidth coil models and that the automatic parameter choices yield an acceptable result.