Development of High-Performance Low-Field MR Imaging for Portable Brain Injury Triage

 描述（由申请人提供）：该项目旨在为低场MRI提供前所未有的速度和成像性能，以证明可以开发低成本、轻量级的MRI实现，以实现稳健、可移动的成像，非常适合诊断时间敏感的损伤，如头部创伤和中风。目前实验性的移动系统对于这种现实世界的应用来说速度太慢，分辨率太低。通过一系列先进的硬件升级和脉冲序列优化，在现有的低场6.5 mT MR成像系统基础上进行创新，我们预计成像速度将提高30倍，从而在约10秒内获得中等高分辨率的3D图像数据集。我们的具体目标是1）优化升级梯度硬件的设计和安装，这将提供更大的灵活性，将我们的脉冲序列推到更高的速度，2）验证优化系统在正常和创伤性脑损伤患者中的临床效用，并与“金标准”3T扫描相比，评价低场系统，这将使我们能够进一步优化低场序列。这个低场项目的技术进步，这是更有效地开发现有的大型试验台系统，将很容易转化为未来的小型化磁共振系统。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project seeks to deliver unprecedented speed and imaging performance to low-field MRI to demonstrate that low-cost, lightweight implementations of MRI can be developed to allow robust, transportable imaging well suited to diagnose time-sensitive injuries such as head trauma and stroke. Current experimental mobile-sized systems are far too slow and low-resolution for such real-world applications. By innovating upon an already state of the art low-field 6.5 mT MR imaging system through a series of advanced hardware upgrades and pulse sequence optimizations, we expect to achieve 30-fold improvement in imaging speed and thus acquire moderately high-resolution 3D image datasets in about 10 seconds. Our specific aims are 1) to optimize the design of and install the upgraded gradient hardware, which would provide greater flexibility push our pulse sequences to far higher speeds, and 2) to validate the clinical utility of the optimized system in normal and Traumatic Brain Injury patients and evaluate the low-field system in comparison with "gold standard" 3T scanning, which will enable us to further optimize our low-field sequences. The technical advances of this low-field project, which are more efficiently developed within an existing larger test-bed system, will be readily translatable into future miniaturized MR systems.