A MR Fingerprinting Development Kit for Quantitative 3D Brain Imaging

Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) is an emerging quantitative imaging technique that enables multiparametric tissue characterization, but its adoption has been hindered by the complexity of data acquisition and post-processing. These technical and implementation challenges have limited its broader clinical deployment.

To develop a modular MRF Development Kit (MRFDK) that enables efficient sequence design, streamlined implementation, and real-time image reconstruction.

Prospective.

T₁ and T₂ relaxation phantom, nine volunteers (seven males and two females), five metastatic brain cancer patients.

3 T, MR Fingerprinting.

Accuracy of T₁ and T₂ quantification was estimated from phantom experiments. Manual ROIs were drawn on brain lesions and contralateral white matter for metastatic cancer patients.

t-test, in vivo repeatability was calculated with Bland-Altman analysis on healthy volunteer scan-rescan data, significance level p < 0.01.

Phantom results showed high accuracy in T₁ and T₂ assessment, with absolute percentage differences of 3% for T₁ and 5% for T₂ compared to offline MATLAB reconstruction. In vivo scans of eight healthy subjects further demonstrated excellent repeatability (bias and agreement: 0.95% ± 1.85% for T₁; 1.78% ± 5.08% for T₂). In patients, metastatic lesions showed significantly higher T₁ and T₂ values (T₁, 1474 ms; T₂, 61 ms) compared to normal white matter (T₁, 913 ms; T₂, 38 ms). With integrated B₁ correction, all T₁ and T₂ maps were available for visualization within 1 min post-MRF scan, enabling immediate image assessment.

A modular MRF development package enabling efficient 3D acquisition and rapid inline reconstruction was developed and evaluated in this study.

Stage 2.