Lung imaging under free-breathing conditions.

Respiratory motion and pulsatile blood flow can generate artifacts in morphological and functional lung imaging. Total acquisition time, and thus the achievable signal to noise ratio, is limited when performing breath-hold and/or electrocardiogram-triggered imaging. To overcome these limitations, imaging during free respiration can be performed using respiratory gating/triggering devices or navigator echoes.

Potential of magnetization transfer MRI for target volume definition in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.

Purpose: To develop a magnetization transfer (MT) module in conjunction with a single-shot MRI readout technique and to investigate the MT phenomenon in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as an adjunct for radiation therapy planning.

Materials And Methods: A total of 10 patients with inoperable NSCLC were investigated using a 1.5T MR scanner.

Assessment of pulmonary perfusion in a single shot using SEEPAGE.

Purpose: To present a single-shot perfusion imaging sequence that does not require contrast agents or a subtraction of a tag and a control image to create the perfusion-weighted contrast. The proposed method is based on SEEPAGE.

Materials And Methods: Experiments with healthy volunteers were performed to qualitatively and quantitatively obtain pulmonary perfusion values in coronal as well as sagittal orientation.

Lung MRI using an MR-compatible active breathing control (MR-ABC).

This work introduces an MR-compatible active breathing control device (MR-ABC) that can be applied to lung imaging. An MR-ABC consists of a pneumotachograph for respiratory monitoring and an airway-sealing unit. Using an MR-ABC, the subjects were forced to suspend breathing for short time intervals, which were used in turn for data acquisition.

Quantitative and o(2) enhanced MRI of the pathologic lung: findings in emphysema, fibrosis, and cystic fibrosis.

Purpose: beyond the pure morphological visual representation, MR imaging offers the possibility to quantify parameters in the healthy, as well as, in pathologic lung parenchyma. Gas exchange is the primary function of the lung and the transport of oxygen plays a key role in pulmonary physiology and pathophysiology. The purpose of this review is to present a short overview of the relaxation mechanisms of the lung and the current technical concepts of T1 mapping and methods of oxygen enhanced MR imaging.

Quantitative regional oxygen transfer imaging of the human lung.

Purpose: To demonstrate that the use of nonquantitative methods in oxygen-enhanced (OE) lung imaging can be problematic and to present a new approach for quantitative OE lung imaging, which fulfills the requirements for easy application in clinical practice.

Materials And Methods: A total of 10 healthy volunteers and three non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients were examined using a 1.5T scanner.

Single-shot quantitative perfusion imaging of the human lung.

The major drawback to quantitative perfusion imaging using arterial spin labeling (ASL) techniques is the need to acquire two images (tag and control), which must be subtracted in order to obtain a perfusion-weighted image. This can potentially result in misregistration artifacts, especially in lung imaging, due to varying lung inflation levels in different breath-holds. In this work a double inversion recovery (DIR) imaging technique that yields perfusion-weighted images of the human lung in a single shot is presented.

Oxygen-enhanced proton imaging of the human lung using T2.

Magnetic susceptibility gradients caused by tissue/air interfaces lead to very short T(2)* times in the human lung. These susceptibility gradients are dependent on the magnetic susceptibility of the respiratory gas and therefore should influence T(2)* relaxation. In this work, a technique for quantitative T(2)* mapping of the human lung during one breath hold is presented.