UTE-SENCEFUL: first results for 3D high-resolution lung ventilation imaging

Area of Science:

• Radiology
• Medical Imaging
• Pulmonary Function Assessment

Background:

• Assessing lung ventilation non-invasively is crucial for diagnosing respiratory diseases.
• Current MRI techniques often require contrast agents or are limited in spatial and temporal resolution.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a 3D MRI technique for free-breathing, non-contrast lung ventilation assessment.
• To compare the performance of the novel 3D technique against a standard 2D method.

Main Methods:

• Development of a 3D-UTE (ultra-short echo time) sequence with a koosh ball trajectory on a 3 Tesla scanner.
• Utilized oversampled k-space and direct current signal for breathing phase sorting.
• Applied gradient delay correction, iterative SENSE reconstruction, and 3D image registration for motion artifact reduction.

Main Results:

• The UTE-based self-gated non-contrast-enhanced functional lung (SENCEFUL) MRI achieved a 49% SNR increase.
• Quantitative ventilation values in healthy subjects agreed with 2D-SENCEFUL and literature data.
• UTE-SENCEFUL successfully visualized and quantified ventilation deficits in a lung tumor patient, outperforming 2D-SENCEFUL.

Conclusions:

• 3D-UTE-SENCEFUL is a robust MRI method providing both morphological and functional lung information in 3D.
• The 3D-UTE approach yields higher resolution ventilation maps with improved SNR and fewer artifacts compared to 2D methods.