New approach for improved radiological diagnosis of pathology by means of fast and robust parameter quantification in 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

自20世纪80年代初获得第一张人体磁共振（MR）图像以来，由于其非侵入性、丰富的信息内容，特别是广泛的可用对比，MRI在医学诊断中发挥了越来越重要的作用。在目前的临床实践中，为了生成具有不同对比度的多幅图像，多次单独的MRI采集是顺序进行的。然而，这一过程耗时，容易出现连续的不对准和配准伪影，并且通常提供各向异性的空间分辨率。此外，这些图像通常具有次优对比度，并且与计算机断层扫描（CT）不同，通常不包含定量信息。我们的目标是从根本上改变临床MRI检查的执行方式。这种方法将使我们能够在单个成像实验中使用具有各向同性空间分辨率的超快速3D MRI序列获得自旋密度和弛豫时间（T1和T2）的定量信息。从这些体素定量3D体数据集，可以在实际图像采集后生成几乎任何对比度和任何角度方向的合成图像。这有可能极大地改善MRI对各种病理的检测，并有望迅速转化为标准化的临床检查方案。在各种磁场强度为1.5T和3T的MR系统上实施和验证后，我们将把新技术应用于多发性硬化症（MS）和法氏病（FD）患者，以证明在中枢神经系统（CNS）病变检测和分类方面的预期改进。为了使该方法对运动具有鲁棒性，从而适用于不合作的儿童患者，我们将通过运动检测和校正方案扩展该方法。这也将允许方法的翻译，例如腹部应用，如肝脏呼吸运动使定量成像困难。定量的一站式方法有可能提高患者的舒适度、扫描和成本效率，以及各种标准临床应用的诊断保真度。

Since the acquisition of the first human magnetic resonance (MR) images in the early 1980s, MRI has played an ever-increasing diagnostic role in medicine due to its non-invasive nature, its rich information content and, in particular, the wide array of available contrasts. In current clinical practice, several individual MRI acquisitions are performed sequentially in order to generate multiple images with varying contrast. However, this procedure is time consuming, prone to successive misalignments and registration artifacts and it usually delivers an anisotropic spatial resolution. In addition, these images often have suboptimal contrast and, unlike in computed tomography (CT), do not typically contain quantitative information. Our goal is to fundamentally change the way clinical MRI exams are carried out. This approach will allow us to obtain quantitative information on spin density and relaxation times (T1 & T2) in a single imaging experiment using an ultra-fast 3D MRI sequence with isotropic spatial resolution. From these voxel-wise quantitative 3D volume data sets, synthetic images of virtually any contrast and at any angular orientation desired can be generated after the actual image acquisition. This has the potential to profoundly improve the detection of various pathologies by MRI and can be expected enable a rapid translation into standardized clinical examination protocols. After implementation and validation on various MR systems with field strengths of 1.5T and 3T, we will apply the new technique to patients diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Fabrys disease (FD) in order to demonstrate the expected improvements in lesion detection and classification in the central nervous system (CNS). In order to make the methodology robust against motion and thus available for uncooperative and pediatric patients we will extend the methodology by a motion detection and correction scheme. This will also allow the translation of the methodology to e.g. abdominal applications, such as the liver where respiratory motion makes quantitative imaging difficult. The quantitative -- one-stop-shop -- approach has the potential to increase patient comfort, scan and cost efficiency as well as diagnostic fidelity for various standard clinical applications.