Interrogating the origin and behavior of magnetic resonance diffusion tensor scalar parameters in the myocardium

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Title Interrogating the origin and behavior of magnetic resonance diffusion tensor scalar parameters in the myocardium
Publication Type dissertation
School or College College of Engineering
Department Biomedical Engineering
Author Abdullah, Osama Mahmoud
Date 2016
Description Myocardial microstructure plays an important role in sustaining the orchestrated beating motion of the heart. Several microstructural components, including myocytes and auxiliary cells, extracellular space, and blood vessels provide the infrastructure for normal heart function, including excitation propagation, myocyte contraction, delivery of oxygen and nutrients, and removing byproduct wastes. Cardiac diseases cause deleterious changes to some or all of these microstructural components in the detrimental process of cardiac remodeling. Since heart failure is among the leading causes of death in the world, new and novel tools to noninvasively characterize heart microstructure are needed for monitoring and staging of cardiac disease. In this regards, diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides a promising framework to probe and quantify tissue microstructure without the need for exogenous contrast agent. As diffusion in 3-dimensional space is characterized by the diffusion tensor, MR diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is being used to noninvasively measure anisotropic diffusion, and thus the magnitude and spatial orientation of microstructural organization of tissues, including the heart. However, even though in vivo cardiac DTI has become more clinically available, to date the origin and behavior of different microstructural components on the measured DTI signal remain to be explicitly specified. The presented studies in this work demonstrate that DTI can be used as a noninvasive and contrast-free imaging modality to characterize myocyte size and density, extracellular collagen content, and the directional magnitude of blood flow. The identified applications are expected to provide metrics to enable physicians to detect, quantify, and stage different microstructural components during progression of cardiac disease.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Diffusion; Heart Failure; heart growth; microcirculation; microstructure; MRI
Dissertation Name Doctor of Philosophy
Language eng
Rights Management ©Osama Mahmoud Abdullah
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 2,129,119 bytes
Identifier etd3/id/4164
ARK ark:/87278/s63r425m
Setname ir_etd
ID 197711
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s63r425m
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