Semiautomated quality assurance for quantitative magnetic resonance imaging

It is now well established that MRI can be used for quantitative (as opposed to simply qualitative) measurements, and good accuracy and precision have been obtained in phantom experiments. To make routine quantitative measurements as part of a clinical scanning protocol, however, quality assurance (QA) methods particularly suited to quantification must be developed. We describe a set of QA tests using clinical protocols on test phantoms, with which we have assessed quantitative performance of our Picker 0.5-T scanner (Picker International, Cleveland, OH) over 2 years. We also describe the automated data processing methods we have developed to deal with the large amounts of data generated by these tests.