Kentaro Akazawa

Magnetic resonance (MR) perfusion identifies tumor angiogenesis or the proliferation of abnormal vessels in tumors. Of the various techniques devised for evaluating cerebral perfusion imaging, the dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) method has been employed most widely in clinical practice. DSC perfusion is used to generate hemodynamic parameters such as relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV). CBF maps can be used to assess neovascularity in tumors, which is thought to correlate with tumor grade and malignant histology. This talk will provide knowledge on how DSC perfusion can be useful in the glioma management in a variety of clinical conditions.

Oliver Wieben

Sadhna Verma

Frederick Epstein

First-pass MRI utilizes ECG-gated saturation-recovery gradient-echo or SSFP imaging applied immediately upon intravenous injection of gadolinium, enabling the visual or quantitative assessment of myocardial perfusion.  For multislice coverage with high spatiotemporal resolution, acceleration is required.  While parallel imaging is standard, compressed sensing, multiband, and/or non-Cartesian trajectories provide improvements, and deep learning may facilitate rapid reconstruction.  Perfusion quantification is important in three-vessel and microvascular disease, and recent deep-learning-based pipelines promise to make quantification routine.  Clinically, while superiority compared to SPECT was demonstrated in 2012, recently noninferiority compared to fractional flow reserve for guiding coronary revascularization was shown, representing another major advance.

Sultan Zaman Mahmud^1,2, Emily C. Graff^3,4, Douglas R. Martin^4,5, Thomas S. Denney^1,2, and Adil Bashir^1,2
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States, ²Auburn University MRI Research Center, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States, ³Department of Pathobiology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States, ⁴Scott-Ritchey Research Center, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States, ⁵Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) plays a vital role in regulating nutrient transport and acts as a barrier to potentially harmful molecules. Disruption of the BBB alters normal neurodevelopment and neuronal function. Protein enriched in astrocytes 15-kDa (PEA15) is crucial in normal neurodevelopment of cats, and cats with a PEA15 loss-of-function (PEA15^-/-) have structural brain abnormalities and behavioral defects. We have previously demonstrated a non-invasive MRI technique to measure BBB permeability in humans. The goal of this study is to investigate if this technique can detect differences in microvascular cerebral blood flow and BBB in PEA15^-/- cats compared to PEA15^+/+.

Zhehao Hu^1,2, Anthony Christodoulou^1,2, Nan Wang¹, Yibin Xie¹, Tianle Cao^1,2, Marcel Maya³, Wensha Yang⁴, Debiao Li^1,2, and Zhaoyang Fan^1,4,5
1Biomedical Imaging Research Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ²Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ³Department of Imaging, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ⁴Department of Radiation Oncology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, ⁵Department of Radiology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States

DSC-MRI and DCE-MRI provide perfusion- and permeability-related parameters, respectively, and are evolving as increasingly common modalities for evaluating a variety of brain cancer diseases. Their different but complementary information may form a more complete basis for evaluation of the complex and heterogeneous tumor microenvironment. However, acquiring both in one exam requires two separate scans as well as two contrast injections. In this work, we propose an MR MultiTasking based Dynamic Imaging for Cerebrovascular Evaluation (MT-DICE) technique that provides DCE- and leakage-corrected DSC-MRI parameters simultaneously with one 7.6-minute scan and a single-dose contrast injection.

Tobias Hoh¹, Valery Vishnevskiy¹, Maximilian Fuetterer¹, and Sebastian Kozerke^1
1Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBT), University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Three-dimensional perfusion CMR requires acceleration methods to enable whole-heart coverage in short acquisition windows, which often rely on data correlation among adjacent time-frames. However, in free-breathing examinations, respiratory motion leads to inconsistencies in the shared data and compromises image quality. In this work, non-rigid organ motion is incorporated into a patch-based locally low-rank reconstruction algorithm as a transformation displacement field for each time frame. This motion-informed locally low-rank reconstruction, combined with Cartesian pseudo-spiral k-t undersampling, is proposed as a dual-sequence acquisition framework to enable quantitative free-breathing whole-heart perfusion CMR. Feasibility is demonstrated in simulations, and volunteers in rest and stress.

Sarah McElroy¹, Giulio Ferrazzi², Muhummad Sohaib Nazir¹, Carl Evans¹, Filippo Bosio¹, Nabila Mughal¹, Karl P Kunze³, Radhouene Neji³, Peter Speier⁴, Daniel Stäb⁵, Christoph Forman⁴, Pier Giorgio Masci¹, Reza Razavi¹, Amedeo Chiribiri¹, and Sébastien Roujol^1
1King's College London, London, United Kingdom, ²IRCCS San Camillo Hospital, Venice, Italy, ³Siemens Healthcare Limited, Frimley, United Kingdom, ⁴Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Erlangen, Germany, ⁵Siemens Healthcare Ltd, Melbourne, Australia

First-pass cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) perfusion imaging is widely used for non-invasive assessment of coronary artery disease (CAD). Conventional CMR perfusion sequences are limited in spatial coverage and resolution. We have developed a SMS-bSSFP sequence with a total acceleration factor of 16 (multiband (MB) acceleration of 3 x in-plane acceleration of 5.5) and compressed sensing reconstruction to enable 1.5 T CMR perfusion with whole-heart coverage and high (1.4 x 1.4 mm²) in-plane spatial resolution. The results from a preliminary study in 6 patients comparing the proposed acquisition against a conventional 3-slice acquisition are presented.

Jichang Zhang¹, Faisal Najeeb², Xinpei Wang¹, Pengfei Xu¹, Hammad Omer², Penny Gowland ³, Sue Francis³, Paul Glover³, Richard Bowtell³, and Chengbo Wang^1
1SPMIC, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China, ²COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan, ³SPMIC, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

This work presents a free breathing Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) reconstruction method called L+S (Low rank plus sparse) with joint sparsity, which improved dynamic contrast performance through integrating an additional temporal Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) constraint by extending the standard L+S decomposition method. Fast Composite Splitting Algorithm (FCSA) is implemented to solve the L+S optimization problem in proposed method, and to minimize the computation complexity from joint sparsity constraints. The proposed method achieved high spatial-temporal resolution, high reconstruction efficiency and improved dynamic contrast simultaneously when comparing with other methods in reconstructing a simulated phantom dataset and a DCE-MRI dataset.

Jaume Coll-Font¹, Onur Afacan¹, Jeanne Chow¹, Richard S Lee¹, Simon K Warfield¹, and Sila Kurugol^1
1Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

Heavy breathing or large bulk motion of infants during acquisition of renal DCE-MRI causes misalignment between volumes, degrades image quality, and reduces the accuracy of estimated quantitative parameters of kidney function. We proposed a robust LTI model-based registration algorithm for motion correction, which improved the temporal stability of the concentration time curves, resulting in improved estimation of tracer kinetic model parameters such as renal filtration rate.