Broadening horizons – impactful imaging across applications and field strengths.

Tuesday, October 10

Location: TBD

Minneapolis, MN, US

Progress with field monitoring on a head-only 7T and full-body 3T MRI

Corey A. Baron, PhD

The Baron Lab has been developing approaches for robust field monitoring on a head-only 7T MRI located at the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (CFMM) since 2019 and has extended field monitoring to their 3T system earlier this year. This presentation will provide a tour of their progress with field monitoring so far, current projects, and perspectives on challenges that should still be solved to facilitate high-throughput studies.

Towards an era of precision MRI

Kawin Setsompop, PhD

In the last few years, there has been an emergence of new data acquisition technologies to help us move towards Precision MRI, or the ability to image the human body much more precisely with MR. With Precision MRI, the goal is to be able to obtain detailed quantitative tissue structural and functional information of the human body at the meso-scopic scale, while producing crisp images that are robust to system imperfections and motions. Exciting new information from Precision MRI should allow us to gain a much better understanding of the structure and function of the human body in health and disease states. This talk will describe some of the acquisition technology that is being developed in my lab towards precision MRI and how field-probe monitoring can play an important role in helping us achieve this goal.

Measuring and reducing background velocity errors in phase contrast MRI

Mike Loecher, PhD

Phase contrast MRI measures tissue velocity with the use of bipolar gradients. However, the additional fields created by these bipolar gradients due to eddy currents and mechanical oscillations also contribute to the measured phase, leading to background velocity errors in the data. In this work, we explore the source of these errors, measure the effects and responses with a Skope camera, as well as use the Skope system to generate a GIRF to predict and prospectively correct for these errors with gradient optimization techniques (GrOpt).

7T workflow – integrated acquisition technology for 7T neuroimaging

Demo Session 1

Combining the Cranberry Edition kit for hardware integration with skope-dm (data manager) we demonstrate the concurrent monitoring workflow which streams data from both the MR scanner and Skope Acquisition System. Learn how this new workflow improvement tool can be integrated into your scanning experiments.

Characterizing system performance with field monitoring – from impulse to image

Demo Session 2

System characterization is important to understanding system performance, especially when developing custom hardware or developing sequences which utilize the full extent of your hardware's capabilities. In this demonstration, you will learn how direct measurements of field dynamics can be used to characterize system performance and how performance can correlate to image quality.

Reconstruction workflows for application of field measurements to image production

Demo Session 3

Field monitoring has been developed over the past decade as a way of understanding field dynamics. Learn how field monitoring can be integrated into diffusion and T2* mapping experiments and data processing pipelines.

Corey A. Baron, PhD

Robarts Research Institute & Department of Medical Biophysics | Western University | Canada

Dr. Corey Baron is a Scientist at the Robarts Research Institute, Assistant Professor of Medical Biophysics at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and the Canada Research Chair of Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging. He is interested in developing multidimensional imaging biomarkers for ultra-high field MRI, and using them to learn more about the brain. Measuring a multidimensional imaging biomarker is another way of saying to measure multiple tissue parameters at the same time, which can greatly improve the ability to diagnose a condition. In MRI, there are many different types of tissue parameters that can be measured. Dr. Baron is especially interested in diffusion MRI, which measures the average random motion of molecules. The motion of the molecules is altered by cell membranes and organelles, and diffusion MRI can give insight into specific microstructure characteristics of the tissue like cell size, shape, and density. In essence, this allows a completely non-invasive virtual microscopy of tissue inside the brain.

Kawin Setsompop, PhD

Department of Radiology | Stanford University | United States

Dr. Kawin Setsompop is an Associate Professor of Radiology and, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering. His research focuses on the development of novel MRI acquisition methods, with the goal of creating imaging technologies that can be used to help better understand brain structure and function for applications in Healthcare and Health sciences. He received his Master’s degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently a faculty at the A.A. Martinos center for biomedical imaging, MGH, as well as part of the Harvard and MIT faculty. His group has pioneered several widely-used MRI acquisition technologies, a number of which have been successfully translated into FDA-approved clinical products on Siemens, GE, Phillips, United Imaging and Bruker MRI scanners worldwide. These technologies are being used daily to study the brain in both clinical and neuroscientific fields.

Mike Loecher, PhD

Radiological Sciences Laboratory | Stanford University | United States

Dr. Mike Loecher is a research scientist at Stanford, CA. His research focuses primarily on improving methods for measuring flow and motion with MRI. Dr. Loecher's research interests range from image acquisition and reconstruction to error correction and post processing strategies.

Eva Rojcek

Head of Marketing

Feel free to reach out to Eva if you have any questions about the upcoming Skope User Meeting.