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A method is described to design parallel transmit (PTX) excitation pulses that are compatible with turbo spin echo (TSE) sequences, based on information available from conventional per-channel B 1 + mapping. The excitation phase of PTX pulses that generate a reduced field of excitation (rFOX) is matched to the phase the quadrature mode of a PTX coil. This enables TSE imaging of a PTX-enabled rFOX excitation combined with standard nonselective refocusing pulses transmitted in the quadrature mode. In-vivo imaging experiments were performed at 7T using a dual channel parallel transmit head coil. In combination with simulations, the CPMG-required excitation phase was confirmed in TSE sequences with refocusing pulses of variable flip angle. Further experiments showed that the same rFOX was generated in TSE and gradient echo sequences, enabling high-resolution imaging with parallel imaging acceleration of the rFOX., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: To show that a combination of parallel imaging using sensitivity encoding (SENSE) and inner volume imaging (IVI) combines the known benefits of both techniques. SENSE with a reduced field of excitation (rFOX) is termed rSENSE., Theory and Methods: The noise level in SENSE reconstructions is reduced by removing voxels from the unfolding process that are rendered silent by using rFOX. The silent voxels need to be identified beforehand, this is done by using rFOX in the coil sensitivity maps. In vivo experiments were performed at 7 Tesla using a 32-channel receive coil., Results: Good image quality could be obtained in vivo with rSENSE at acceleration factors that are higher than could be obtained using SENSE or IVI alone. With rSENSE we were also able to accelerate scans using an rFOX that was purposely designed to be imperfect or incompatible at all with IVI., Conclusion: rSENSE has been demonstrated in vivo with two-dimensionally selective radiofrequency pulses. Besides allowing additional scan acceleration, it offers a greater robustness and flexibility than IVI. The proposed method can be used with other field strengths, anatomies and other rFOX techniques. Magn Reson Med 78:88-96, 2017. © 2016 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes., (© 2016 The Authors. The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.)

Purpose: To compare two pulsed, volumetric chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) acquisition schemes: steady state (SS) and pseudosteady state (PS) for the same brain coverage, spatial/spectral resolution and scan time., Methods: Both schemes were optimized for maximum sensitivity to amide proton transfer (APT) and nuclear Overhauser enhancement (NOE) effects through Bloch-McConnell simulations, and compared in terms of sensitivity to APT and NOE effects, and to transmit field inhomogeneity. Five consented healthy volunteers were scanned on a 7 Tesla Philips MR-system using the optimized protocols at three nominal B 1 amplitudes: 1 μT, 2 μT, and 3 μT., Results: Region of interest based analysis revealed that PS is more sensitive (P < 0.05) to APT and NOE effects compared with SS at low B 1 amplitudes (0.7-1.0 μT). Also, both sequences have similar dependence on the transmit field inhomogeneity. For the optimum CEST presaturation parameters (1 μT and 2 μT for APT and NOE, respectively), NOE is less sensitive to the inhomogeneity effects (15% signal to noise ratio [SNR] change for a B 1 dropout of 40%) compared with APT (35% SNR change for a B 1 dropout of 40%)., Conclusion: For the same brain coverage, spatial/spectral resolution and scan time, at low power levels PS is more sensitive to the slow chemical exchange-mediated processes compared with SS. Magn Reson Med 77:2280-2287, 2017. © 2016 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes., (© 2016 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.)

Increasing the concentration of oxygen dissolved in water is known to increase the recovery rate (R1 = 1/T1) of longitudinal magnetization (T1 relaxation). Direct T1 changes in response to precise hyperoxic gas challenges have not yet been quantified and the actual effect of increasing arterial oxygen concentration on the T1 of brain parenchyma remains unclear. The aim of this work was to use quantitative T1 mapping to measure tissue T1 changes in response to precisely targeted hyperoxic respiratory challenges ranging from baseline end-tidal oxygen (PetO 2 ) to approximately 500 mmHg. We did not observe measureable T1 changes in either gray matter or white matter parenchymal tissue. The T1 of peripheral cerebrospinal fluid located within the sulci, however, was reduced as a function of PetO 2 . No significant T1 changes were observed in the ventricular cerebrospinal fluid under hyperoxia. Our results indicate that care should be taken to distinguish actual T1 changes from those which may be related to partial volume effects with cerebrospinal fluid, or regions with increased fluid content such as edema when examining hyperoxia-induced changes in T1 using methods based on T1-weighted imaging.

The purpose of this work was to show that the overall peak power of RF pulses for CAIPIRINHA excitation can be substantially reduced by applying interslice phase relaxation. The optimal phases are scan dependent and can be quickly calculated by the proposed method. The multi-band RF pulse design is implemented as the minimization of a linear objective function with quadratic constraints. The interslice phase is considered to be a variable for optimization. In the case of a phase cycling scheme (CAIPIRINHA), the peak power is considered over all pulses. The computation time (about 1 s) is compatible with online RF pulse design. It is shown that the optimal interslice phases depend on the CAIPIRINHA scheme used and that RF peak power is reduced when the CAIPIRINHA phase cycling is taken into account in the optimization. The proposed method is extremely fast and results in RF pulses with low peak power for CAIPIRINHA excitation. The MATLAB implementation is given in the appendix; it allows for online determination of scan-dependent phase parameters. Furthermore, the method can be easily extended to pTx shimming systems in the context of multi-slice excitations, and this possibility is included in the software., (Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Normocapnic hyperoxic and hypercapnic hyperoxic gas challenges are increasingly being used in cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) and calibrated functional MRI experiments. The longitudinal arterial blood water relaxation time (T1a) change with hyperoxia will influence signal quantification through mechanisms relating to elevated partial pressure of plasma-dissolved O2 (pO2) and increased oxygen bound to hemoglobin in arteries (Ya) and veins (Yv). The dependence of T1a on Ya and Yv has been elegantly characterized ex vivo; however, the combined influence of pO2, Ya and Yv on T1a in vivo under normal ventilation has not been reported. Here, T1a is calculated during hyperoxia in vivo by a heuristic approach that evaluates T1 -dependent arterial spin labeling (ASL) signal changes to varying gas stimuli. Healthy volunteers (n = 14; age, 31.5 ± 7.2 years) were scanned using pseudo-continuous ASL in combination with room air (RA; 21% O2/79% N2), hypercapnic normoxic (HN; 5% CO2/21% O2/74% N2) and hypercapnic hyperoxic (HH; 5% CO2/95% O2) gas administration. HH T1a was calculated by requiring that the HN and HH cerebral blood flow (CBF) change be identical. The HH protocol was then repeated in patients (n = 10; age, 61.4 ± 13.3 years) with intracranial stenosis to assess whether an HH T1a decrease prohibited ASL from being performed in subjects with known delayed blood arrival times. Arterial blood T1a decreased from 1.65 s at baseline to 1.49 ± 0.07 s during HH. In patients, CBF values in the affected flow territory for the HH condition were increased relative to baseline CBF values and were within the physiological range (RA CBF = 36.6 ± 8.2 mL/100 g/min; HH CBF = 45.2 ± 13.9 mL/100 g/min). It can be concluded that hyperoxic (95% O2) 3-T arterial blood T1aHH = 1.49 ± 0.07 s relative to a normoxic T1a of 1.65 s., (Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Purpose: A new method, called Transmit and Receive Patterns from Low-Tip-angle gradient-Echo Images (TRIPLET), is described which simultaneously maps the B1+ and B1- fields of a transmit/receive radiofrequency coil array. The input data are low-tip-angle gradient-echo images, which can be acquired in a relatively short scanning time., Theory and Methods: For each voxel in the field of view, a matrix can be assembled with the low-tip-angle gradient-echo image values of the radiofrequency coil array. Applying the singular value decomposition to those matrices, datasets are obtained which show a high resemblance with the true B1+ and B1- fields. These datasets are a voxel-wise scaled version of the true radiofrequency maps. The channel independent scaling parameters can be found by implicitly forcing the reconstructed fields to be solutions of the Maxwell equations. This is achieved by introducing a multipole expansion consisting of Bessel/Fourier functions., Results: Two FDTD simulated radiofrequency fields for two coil array combinations at 7 T and a measured, in vivo dataset at 7 T are investigated to illustrate the singular value decomposition analysis of the low-tip-angle gradient-echo images and to show how the B1+ and B1- fields can be reconstructed by Transmit and Receive Patterns from Low-Tip-angle gradient-Echo Images., Conclusion: The Transmit and Receive Patterns from Low-Tip-angle gradient-Echo Images algorithm can convert the datasets from singular value decomposition analysis of low-tip-angle gradient-echo images to true B1+ and B1- fields., (Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Purpose: Several parallel transmit MRI techniques require knowledge of the transmit radiofrequency field profiles (B1 (+) ). During the past years, various methods have been developed to acquire this information. Often, these methods suffer from long measurement times and produce maps exhibiting regions with poor signal-to-noise ratio and artifacts. In this article, a model-based reconstruction procedure is introduced that improves the robustness of B1 (+) mapping., Theory and Methods: The missing information from undersampled B1 (+) maps and the regions of poor signal to noise ratio are reconstructed through projection into the space of spherical functions that arise naturally from the solution of the Helmholtz equations in the spherical coordinate system., Results: As a result, B1 (+) data over a limited range of the field of view/volume is sufficient to reconstruct the B1 (+) over the full spatial domain in a fast and robust way. The same model is exploited to filter the noise of the measured maps. Results from simulations and in vivo measurements confirm the validity of the proposed method., Conclusion: A spherical functions model can well approximate the magnetic fields inside the body with few basis terms. Exploiting this compression capability, B1 (+) maps are reconstructed in regions of unknown or corrupted values., (Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Mapping the longitudinal relaxation time (T(1)) of brain tissue is of great interest for both clinical research and MRI sequence development. For an unambiguous interpretation of in vivo variations in T(1) images, it is important to understand the degree of variability that is associated with the quantitative T(1) parameter. This paper presents a general framework for estimating the uncertainty in quantitative T(1) mapping by combining a slice-shifted multi-slice inversion recovery EPI technique with the statistical wild-bootstrap approach. Both simulations and experimental analyses were performed to validate this novel approach and to evaluate the estimated T(1) uncertainty in several brain regions across four healthy volunteers. By estimating the T(1) uncertainty, it is shown that the variation in T(1) within anatomic regions for similar tissue types is larger than the uncertainty in the measurement. This indicates that heterogeneity of the inspected tissue and/or partial volume effects can be the main determinants for the observed variability in the estimated T(1) values. The proposed approach to estimate T(1) and its uncertainty without the need for repeated measurements may also prove to be useful for calculating effect sizes that are deemed significant when comparing group differences., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) is a technique to indirectly detect pools of exchangeable protons through the water signal. To increase its applicability to human studies, it is needed to develop sensitive pulse sequences for rapidly acquiring whole-organ images while adhering to stringent amplifier duty cycle limitations and specific absorption rate restrictions. In addition, the interfering effects of direct water saturation and conventional magnetization transfer contrast complicate CEST quantification and need to be reduced as much as possible. It is shown that for protons exchanging with rates of less than 50-100 Hz, such as imaged in amide proton transfer experiments, these problems can be addressed by using a three-dimensional steady state pulsed acquisition of limited B(1) strength (≈ 1 μT). Such an approach exploits the fact that the direct water saturation width, magnetization transfer contrast magnitude, and specific absorption rate increase strongly with B(1) , while the size of the CEST effect for such protons depends minimally on B(1) . A short repetition time (65 ms) steady-state sequence consisting of a brief saturation pulse (25 ms) and a segmented echo-planar imaging train allowed acquisition of a three-dimensional whole-brain volume in approximately 11 s per saturation frequency, while remaining well within specific absorption rate and duty cycle limits. Magnetization transfer contrast was strongly reduced, but substantial saturation effects were found at frequencies upfield from water, which still confound the use of magnetization transfer asymmetry analysis. Fortunately, the limited width of the direct water saturation signal could be exploited to fit it with a Lorentzian function allowing CEST quantification. Amide proton transfer effects ranged between 1.5% and 2.5% in selected white and grey matter regions. This power and time-efficient 3D pulsed CEST acquisition scheme should aid endogenous CEST quantification at both high and low fields., (Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Background: We present a simple, data-driven method to extract haemodynamic response functions (HRF) from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series, based on the Fourier-wavelet regularised deconvolution (ForWaRD) technique. HRF data are required for many fMRI applications, such as defining region-specific HRFs, effciently representing a general HRF, or comparing subject-specific HRFs., Results: ForWaRD is applied to fMRI time signals, after removing low-frequency trends by a wavelet-based method, and the output of ForWaRD is a time series of volumes, containing the HRF in each voxel. Compared to more complex methods, this extraction algorithm requires few assumptions (separability of signal and noise in the frequency and wavelet domains and the general linear model) and it is fast (HRF extraction from a single fMRI data set takes about the same time as spatial resampling). The extraction method is tested on simulated event-related activation signals, contaminated with noise from a time series of real MRI images. An application for HRF data is demonstrated in a simple event-related experiment: data are extracted from a region with significant effects of interest in a first time series. A continuous-time HRF is obtained by fitting a nonlinear function to the discrete HRF coeffcients, and is then used to analyse a later time series., Conclusion: With the parameters used in this paper, the extraction method presented here is very robust to changes in signal properties. Comparison of analyses with fitted HRFs and with a canonical HRF shows that a subject-specific, regional HRF significantly improves detection power. Sensitivity and specificity increase not only in the region from which the HRFs are extracted, but also in other regions of interest.