Traditional Posters: Body Imaging

Lung & Mediastinum MRI

Hall B Wednesday 13:30-15:30

2504. Inflammation Assessment in the Lungs of LPS-Challenged Rodents: Comparison Between Radial Ultra-Short Echo Time (UTE) and Cartesian MR Imaging

Magdalena Zurek¹, Laura Carrero-Gonzalez^2,3, Selina Bucher², Thomas Kaulisch², Detlef Stiller², Yannick Crémillieux<sup>1

1</sup>Université de Lyon, Laboratoire CREATIS-LRMN, Lyon, France; ²Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG, Biberach, Germany; ³Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

A radial ultra short-echo time (UTE) sequence has been shown to be appropriate in pulmonary imaging due to its robustness against motion and its improved image resolution. In this study, we evaluated the accuracy of edema detection using two protocols based on conventional-Cartesian and UTE radial imaging approaches. Despite degraded image quality in case of Cartesian images due to the motion, similar inflammation extent was found for both approaches. The UTE technique, applied under free-breathing conditions, will certainly prove to be quite useful in routine MR investigations applied on models of lung diseases associated with inflammation or mucous hypersecretion.

2505. Ultrashort Echo Time (UTE) MR Lung Imaging with Respiratory Motion Compensation

Jiangsheng Yu¹, Yiqun Xue¹, Hamidreza Saligheh Rad¹, Hee Kwon Song<sup>1

1</sup>Laboratory for Structural NMR Imaging, Department of Radiology,, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Ultra-short echo time (UTE) MRI has been successfully applied to lung imaging, but so far the issue of respiratory motion during imaging the lung parenchyma has not yet been addressed. In this work, a respiratory motion-compensated UTE lung MRI technique is presented. This technique applies the golden-angle view increment strategy in conjunction with respiratory self-gating to reconstruct images at different respiratory phases to reduce respiratory motion artifacts. The in-vivo results demonstrate that lung image quality is significantly enhanced with improved visualization and delineation of lung vasculature, as well as improved SNR, as compared to conventional gradient echo images.

2506. Comparison of Lung T2* Measurements at 1.5T and 3.0T with Ultrashort Echo Time (UTE) Sequence

Jiangsheng Yu¹, Yiqun Xue¹, Hee Kwon Song<sup>1

1</sup>University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Accurate assessments of lung T2* may be important as it has the potential to detect structural and functional changes caused by lung diseases such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis and fibrosis. While measurements have been carried out in both animals and humans at 1.5T, studies on human lung at 3T have not yet been reported. In this work, we compare T2* values in normal human lungs at 1.5T and 3.0T using an ultrashort echo time (UTE) pulse sequence. Results show the average lung T2* of 0.72 (±0.17) ms at 3.0T is considerably shorter than 2.2 (±0.43) ms at 1.5T.

2507. Time-Resolved Lung Perfusion- And Ventilation-Weighted MRI by Wavelet Analysis

Grzegorz Bauman^1,2, Julien Dinkel³, Michael Puderbach³, Lothar Rudi Schad<sup>2

1</sup>Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; ²Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany; ³Department of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany

Non-contrast based assessment of the pulmonary function using MRI remains challenging. We propose a novel post-processing method based on the Wavelet analysis to retrieve information about pulmonary perfusion and ventilation. The method utilizes rapid acquisition of time-resolved MR-data using a 2D Steady-State Free Precession sequence implemented on a 1.5 T whole-body MR-scanner. Wavelet transform allows for a robust analysis of non-stationary physiological signals (respiratory/cardiac cycles). The aim of this study was to show feasibility of the proposed approach.

2508. Improved Visualization of Pulmonary Parenchyma Using SSFP Sequence for Dynamic MR-Studies