iMRI Methods for Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

描述（由申请人提供）： 在美国，肝脏恶性肿瘤导致显著的发病率和死亡率。幸运的是，对于肝细胞癌或局限于肝脏的转移性结直肠癌患者，单个肝脏病变的手术治疗可以获得良好的预后。然而，手术仅限于这些患者的10%，对于所有其他患者，治疗选择有限。微创热消融有可能提供一种非手术治疗选择。MRI可以提供肝脏内治疗设备的实时可视化。MRI还可以通过提供实时温度成像来潜在地确保靶肿瘤组织的充分加热和邻近关键器官的保留。这种能力将提高热疗的有效性和安全性。没有其他成像模式能够提供体内温度图。不幸的是，MRI通常被绕过作为监测模式，而有利于其他模式，如超声和CT。这是因为由于呼吸运动伪影，用于肝脏消融的鲁棒实时测温的承诺仍然是一个难以捉摸的目标。在斯坦福大学，我们已经成功地开发了适用于静止组织（如大脑和前列腺）微创治疗的MR温度映射技术。我们现在将这项工作扩展到肝脏，因为它具有重要的临床意义。主要重点将是开发MR方法，以确保准确和精确的温度成像，并确定在动物研究中达到的准确度和精密度。具体而言，我们将通过使用门控、导航、多基线、容积成像方法来改善基线相位校正。这些改进是克服MR温度成像用于指导热治疗的障碍的关键。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Malignant neoplasms of the liver cause significant morbidity and mortality in the US. Fortunately, for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma or metastatic colorectal carcinoma that is limited to the liver, surgical treatment of the individual hepatic lesions can result in a favorable prognosis. However, surgery is limited to 10% of these patients, and for all others, treatment options are limited. Minimally invasive thermal ablation has the potential to provide a non-surgical treatment option. MRI can provide real-time visualization of treatment devices within the liver. MRI can also potentially ensure adequate heating of target tumor tissue and sparing of adjacent critical organs by providing real-time temperature imaging. This capability would enhance both the effectiveness and safety of thermal therapy. No other imaging modality is capable of providing in vivo temperature maps. Unfortunately, MRI is generally bypassed as a monitoring modality in favor of other modalities such as ultrasound and CT. This is because the promise of robust real-time thermometry for liver ablation has remained an elusive goal due to respiratory motion artifacts. At Stanford, we have been successful in developing MR temperature-mapping techniques suitable for use in minimally invasive treatment of stationary tissues such as the brain and the prostate. We now extend this work to the liver because of its great clinical importance. The major focus will be to develop MR methods that will ensure accurate and precise temperature imaging and to define the achieved accuracy and precision in animal studies. Specifically, we will improve the baseline phase correction with the use of a gated, navigated, multibaseline, volumetric imaging method. These improvements are the key to overcoming the barriers to the use of MR temperature imaging for guiding thermal therapies.