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Richard Ernst, Hans Primas’ second Ph.D. student, gives a brief overview of Primas’ early achievements in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance and of his role in the development of a young branch of science.

MRgFUS (Magnetic Resonance guided Focused UltraSound) is a new and non-invasive technique to treat different diseases in the oncology field, that uses Focused Ultrasound (FUS) to induce necrosis in the lesion. Temperature change measurements during ultrasound thermo-therapies can be performed through magnetic resonance monitoring by using Proton Resonance Frequency (PRF) thermometry. It measures the phase variation resulting from the temperature-dependent changes in resonance frequency by subtracting one phase baseline image from actual phase. Referenceless thermometry aims to re-duce artefacts caused by tissue motion and frequency drift, fitting the back-ground phase outside the heated region. The aim of this contribution is to pro-pose a novel background phase reconstruction method using Radial Basis Func-tion (RBF) interpolation. The effectiveness of the method has been demonstrat-ed by comparing it against the classical PRF shift and polynomial referenceless approach. The comparison evaluates temperature rises in uterine fibroids during MRgFUS treatments on a set of 10 patients.