| Description |
This dissertation presents original research that improves the ability of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure temperature in aqueous tissue using the proton resonance frequency (PRF) shift and T1 measurements in fat tissue in order to monitor focused ultrasound (FUS) treatments. The inherent errors involved in measuring the longitudinal relaxation time T1 using the variable flip angle method with a two-dimensional (2D) acquisition are presented. The edges of the slice profile can contribute a significant amount of signal for large flip angles at steady state, which causes significant errors in the T1 estimate. Only a narrow range of flip angle combinations provided accurate T1 estimates. Respiration motion causes phase artifacts, which lead to errors when measuring temperature changes using the PRF method. A respiration correction method for 3D imaging temperature of the breast is presented. Free induction decay (FID) navigators were used to measure and correct phase offsets induced by respiration. The precision of PRF temperature measurements within the breast was improved by an average factor of 2.1 with final temperature precision of approximately 1 °C. Locating the position of the ultrasound focus in MR coordinates of an ultrasound transducer with multiple degrees of freedom can be difficult. A rapid method for predicting the position using 3 tracker coils with a special MRI pulse iv sequence is presented. The Euclidean transformation of the coil's current positions to their calibration positions was used to predict the current focus position. The focus position was predicted to within approximately 2.1 mm in less than 1 s. MRI typically has tradeoffs between imaging field of view and spatial and temporal resolution. A method for acquiring a large field of view with high spatial and temporal resolution is presented. This method used a multiecho pseudo-golden angle stack of stars imaging sequence to acquire the large field of view with high spatial resolution and k-space weighted image contrast (KWIC) to increase the temporal resolution. The pseudo-golden angle allowed for removal of artifacts introduced by the KWIC reconstruction algorithm. The multiple echoes allowed for high readout bandwidth to reduce blurring due to off resonance and chemical shift as well as provide separate water/fat images, estimates of the initial signal magnitude M(0), T2 * time constant, and combination of echo phases. The combined echo phases provided significant improvement to the PRF temperature precision, and ranged from ~0.3-1.0 °C within human breast. M(0) and T2 * values can possibly be used as a measure of temperature in fat. |
