Tailored magnetic resonance fingerprinting of post-operative pediatric brain tumor patients

Brain and spinal cord tumors are the second most common cancer in children and account for one out of four cancers diagnosed. However, the long acquisition times associated with acquiring both data types prohibit using quantitative MR (qMR) in pediatric imaging protocols. This study aims to demonstrate the tailored magnetic resonance fingerprinting's (TMRF) ability to simultaneously provide quantitative maps (T₁, T₂) and multi-contrast qualitative images (T₁ weighted, T₁ FLAIR, T₂ weighted) rapidly in pediatric brain tumor patients.

In this work, we imaged five pediatric patients with brain tumors (resected/residual) using TMRF at 3 T. We compared the TMRF-derived T₂ weighted images with those from the vendor-supplied sequence (as the gold standard, GS) for healthy and pathological tissue signal intensities. The relaxometric maps from TMRF were subjected to a region of interest (ROI) analysis to differentiate between healthy and pathological tissues. We performed the Wilcoxon rank sum test to check for significant differences between the two tissue types.

We found significant differences (p < 0.05) in both T₁ and T₂ ROI values between the two tissue types. A strong correlation was found between the TMRF-based T₂ weighted and GS signal intensities for the healthy (correlation coefficient, r = 0.99) and pathological tissues (r = 0.88).

The TMRF implementation provides the two relaxometric maps and can potentially save ~2 min if it replaces the T₂-weighted imaging in the current protocol.