Browsing by Subject "Diffusion weighted imaging"
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Item Open Access 2D RF pulse design for optimized reduced field-of-view imaging at 1.5T and 3T(Elsevier Inc., 2021-10-22) Eren, Orhun Caner; Barlas, Bahadır Alp; Sarıtaş, Emine ÜlküTwo-dimensional spatially selective radiofrequency (2DRF) excitation pulses are widely used for reduced field-of-view (FOV) targeted high-resolution diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), especially for anatomically small regions such as the spinal cord and prostate. The reduction in FOV achieved by 2DRF pulses significantly improve the in-plane off-resonance artifacts in single-shot echo planar imaging (ss-EPI). However, long durations of 2DRF pulses create a sensitivity to through-plane off-resonance effects, especially at 3 T where the off-resonance field doubles with respect to 1.5 T. This work proposes a parameter-based optimization approach to design 2DRF pulses with blips along the slice-select axis, with the goal of maximizing slab sharpness while minimizing off-resonance effects on 1.5 T and 3 T MRI scanners, separately. Extensive Bloch simulations are performed to evaluate the off-resonance robustness of 2DRF pulses. Three different metrics are proposed to quantify the similarity between the actual and ideal 2D excitation profiles, based on the signals within and outside the targeted reduced-FOV region. In addition, simulations on a digital brain phantom are performed for visual comparison purposes. The results show that maintaining a sharp profile is the primary design requirement at 1.5 T, necessitating the usage of relatively high slab sharpness with a time-bandwidth product (TBW) around 8–10. In contrast, off-resonance robustness is the primary design requirement at 3 T, requiring the usage of a moderate slap sharpness with TBW around 5–7.Item Open Access Phase-correcting non-local means filtering for diffusion-weighted imaging of the spinal cord(John Wiley, 2018) Kafalı, Sevgi Gökçe; Çukur, Tolga; Sarıtaş, Emine ÜlküPurpose: DWI suffers from low SNR when compared to anatomical MRI. To maintain reasonable SNR at relatively high spatial resolution, multiple acquisitions must be averaged. However, subject motion or involuntary physiological motion during diffusion-sensitizing gradients cause phase offsets among acquisitions. When the motion is localized to a small region, these phase offsets become particularly problematic. Complex averaging of acquisitions lead to cancellations from these phase offsets, whereas magnitude averaging results in noise amplification. Here, we propose an improved reconstruction for multi-acquisition DWI that effectively corrects for phase offsets while reducing noise. Theory and Methods: Each acquisition is processed with a refocusing reconstruction for global phase correction and a partial k-space reconstruction via projection-onto-convex-sets (POCS). The proposed reconstruction then embodies a new phase-correcting non-local means (PC-NLM) filter. PC-NLM is performed on the complex-valued outputs of the POCS algorithm aggregated across acquisitions. The PC-NLM filter leverages the shared structure among multiple acquisitions to simultaneously alleviate nuisance factors including phase offsets and noise. Results: Extensive simulations and in vivo DWI experiments of the cervical spinal cord are presented. The results demonstrate that the proposed reconstruction improves image quality by mitigating signal loss because of phase offsets and reducing noise. Importantly, these improvements are achieved while preserving the accuracy of apparent diffusion coefficient maps. Conclusion: An improved reconstruction incorporating a PC-NLM filter for multi-acquisition DWI is presented. This reconstruction can be particularly beneficial for high-resolution or high-b-value DWI acquisitions that suffer from low SNR and phase offsets from local motion.