Non-uniform self-gated UTE (nuSG-UTE) for lung function assessment from native MR data

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Meinrad Beer; Professor Dr. Volker Rasche
• Subject Area: Radiology ; Medical Physics, Biomedical Technology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465599659

Lung imaging by MRI is still limited by the intrinsically low signal and by artifacts, caused by the cardiac and respiratory motion. With cardiac and respiratory gating/triggering as well as with real-time imaging, it has been shown with a variety of imaging techniques, that MRI holds the potential for providing perfusion and ventilation information based on the analysis of native MR data. Where the real-time approaches suffer from low signal and rather poor temporal resolution, the gating/triggering approaches may suffer from the assumption of regular and reproducible respiratory and cardiac motion. Especially in patients, this is often not met due to the underlying pathology, which in case of long acquisition times frequently cause rate and amplitude changes in the respiratory motion.In the proposed project, we aim at evaluating a gating technique, capable of handling non-uniform motion for providing continuous data over the cardiac and respiratory cycle, similar to real-time approaches but with improved image qualities. The approach is based on our non-uniform self-gating (nuSG) approach, which has proven excellent performance in imaging of cardiac arrhythmia and has initially been transferred to lung imaging, even in case of non-uniform respiratory motion pattern. The approach will be extended to enable nuSG for ultrashort echo time acquisitions (UTE) and simultaneous gating of respiratory and cardiac motion, thus enabling the assessment of the lung parenchyma density, fractional ventilation, and non-contrast enhanced perfusion in patients, even in cases of highly irregular respiratory motion pattern.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants