The State-of-the-Art of Patient Portals: Adapting to External Factors, Addressing Barriers, and Innovating.

Background And Objective: Recent external factors-the 21st Century Cures Act and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic-have stimulated major changes in the patient portal landscape. The objective of this state-of-the-art review is to describe recent developments in the patient portal literature and to identify recommendations and future directions for the design, implementation, and evaluation of portals.

Methods: To focus this review on salient contemporary issues, we elected to center it on four topics: (1) 21st Century Cures Act's impact on patient portals (e.

Exchange-mediated contrast in CEST and spin-lock imaging.

Purpose: Magnetic resonance images of biological media based on chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) show contrast that depends on chemical exchange between water and other protons. In addition, spin-lattice relaxation rates in the rotating frame (R1ρ) are also affected by exchange, especially at high fields, and can be exploited to provide novel, exchange-dependent contrast. Here, we evaluate and compare the factors that modulate the exchange contrast for these methods using simulations and experiments on simple, biologically relevant samples.

T1ρ mapping of pediatric epiphyseal and articular cartilage in the knee.

Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility of measuring T1ρ values in epiphyseal cartilage in children, we have conducted a novel study of spin locking techniques. Adult articular cartilage has been widely studied with spin locking techniques by magnetic resonance imaging. However, no results are available for in vivo T1ρ imaging of developing cartilage.

Contributions of chemical and diffusive exchange to T1ρ dispersion.

Variations in local magnetic susceptibility may induce magnetic field gradients that affect the signals acquired for MR imaging. Under appropriate diffusion conditions, such fields produce effects similar to slow chemical exchange. These effects may also be found in combination with other chemical exchange processes at multiple time scales.

Improved in vivo measurement of myocardial transverse relaxation with 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging.

Purpose: To develop practical methods at 3 Tesla (T) for measuring myocardial transverse relaxation in normal human myocardium.

Materials And Methods: Ten healthy volunteers were investigated with four multi-echo, turbo spin-echo (TSE) methods. Each method traded acquired phase encoding lines per image for echo-image sample points obtained along the T(2) decay curve.