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年代初首次获得人类磁共振（MR）图像以来，MRI由于其非侵入性、丰富的信息内容，特别是广泛的可用对比度，在医学中发挥了越来越重要的诊断作用。在当前的临床实践中，顺序执行几个单独的MRI采集，以便生成具有不同对比度的多个图像。然而，这个过程是耗时的，易于连续的未对准和配准伪影，并且它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检查的方式。这种方法将使我们能够获得定量信息的自旋密度和弛豫时间（T1和T2）在一个单一的成像实验中使用超快速三维MRI序列与各向同性的空间分辨率。从这些逐体素的定量3D体积数据集，在实际图像采集之后，可以生成实际上任何对比度和任何期望的角度取向的合成图像。这有可能极大地改善MRI对各种病理的检测，并有望快速转化为标准化的临床检查方案。在1.5T和3 T场强的各种MR系统上实施和验证后，我们将把新技术应用于诊断为多发性硬化症（MS）和法布里病（FD）的患者，以证明中枢神经系统（CNS）病变检测和分类的预期改善。为了使该方法对运动的鲁棒性，从而可用于不合作和儿科患者，我们将通过运动检测和校正方案来扩展该方法。这还将允许将该方法转化为例如腹部应用，诸如其中呼吸运动使得定量成像困难的肝脏。定量-一站式-方法有可能提高患者舒适度、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.