Fast 3D brain MR fingerprinting based on multi-axis spiral projection trajectory

Area of Science:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Quantitative Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) is a powerful technique for quantitative tissue property mapping.
• Traditional 3D MRF methods can be time-consuming, limiting their clinical applicability for whole-brain scans.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a rapid, sub-millimeter resolution 3D MRF technique for whole-brain quantitative imaging.
• To enhance the speed and robustness of 3D MRF acquisitions.

Main Methods:

• Implemented a multi-axis spiral projection imaging (maSPI) acquisition trajectory for 3D MRF.
• Utilized steady-state precession and slab excitation with optimized spiral interleaves.
• Employed a sliding-window method to reduce necessary time points and accelerate acquisition, achieving up to an 8x speed increase over stack-of-spiral (SOS).

Main Results:

• Phantom measurements showed excellent agreement with gold standards (R² ≈ 0.99).
• In vivo whole-brain parametric maps were acquired with 1 mm and 0.8 mm isotropic resolution in 5.0 and 6.0 minutes, respectively.
• maSPI demonstrated superior robustness to head motion compared to SOS in dynamic in vivo experiments.

Conclusions:

• 3D MRF utilizing an maSPI acquisition scheme enables rapid and robust high-resolution parametric mapping of the whole brain.
• This technique has the potential for further acceleration, paving the way for more efficient quantitative MRI.