Faculty Bibliography

Parallel transmitter techniques are a promising approach for reducing transmitter B1 inhomogeneity due to the potential for adjusting the spatial excitation profile with independent RF pulses. These techniques may be further improved with transmit sensitivity encoding (SENSE) methods because the sensitivity information in pulse design provides an excitation that is inherently compensated for transmitter B1 inhomogeneity. This paper presents a proof of this concept using transmit SENSE 3D tailored RF pulses designed for small flip angles. An eight-channel receiver coil was used to mimic parallel transmission for brain imaging at 3T. The transmit SENSE pulses were based on the fast-k(z) design and produced 5-mm-thick slices at a flip angle of 30 degrees with only a 4.3-ms pulse length. It was found that the transmit SENSE pulses produced more homogeneous images than those obtained from the complex sum of images from all receivers excited with a standard RF pulse.

An animal model was developed to monitor [K(+)] in the brain using partial K(+) replacement with Rb(+) and (87)Rb MRI. Fifty-one rats were given 0-80 mM of RbCl in the drinking water for up to 90 days. Focal cerebral ischemia was produced in 15 of the animals. Na, K, and Rb content in precision-guided submilligram samples of cortical brain were determined by emission flame photometry. Multinuclear (87)Rb/(23)Na/(1)H MRI was performed on phantoms and rats at 3T using a twisted projection imaging (TPI) scheme for (87)Rb/(23)Na, and custom-built surface or parallel cosine transmit/receive coils. Brain [Rb(+)] was safely brought up to 17-25 mEq/kg within 2-3 weeks of feeding. The characteristic patterns of [K(+)] decrease (with a sharp drop at 3-4 hr of ischemia) and [Na(+)] increase (at a rate of 31%/hr) observed previously in animals without Rb/K substitution were reproduced in ischemic cortex. The Rb/(Rb+K) ratio increased over time in ischemic areas (R = 0.91, P < 0.001), suggesting an additional index of ischemia progression. Preliminary (87)Rb MRI gave an estimate of 20-25 mEq Rb/kg brain weight (N = 2). In conclusion, brain Rb(+) is detectable by (87)Rb MRI and does not significantly interfere with ion dynamics in ischemic brain, which enables (87)Rb MRI studies of K(+) in ischemia.

Triple quantum (TQ) sodium MRI techniques with clinically acceptable 18-min data acquisition times were demonstrated in vivo in a nonhuman primate model of focal brain ischemia. Focal brain ischemia was induced in four animals using embolization coils to occlude the posterior cerebral artery, and a balloon catheter to occlude the middle cerebral artery. A statistically significant increase (P < 0.001) in the TQ sodium MRI signal intensity in the ischemic hemisphere relative to the contralateral hemisphere was seen at all time points in all four animals. This increased TQ sodium MRI signal intensity was demonstrated as early as 0.6 hr after the onset of ischemia. The TQ sodium MRI hyperintensity corresponded to the anatomical location of the ischemic cortex, as indicated by the registration of the TQ imaging data with anatomical proton MRI data. The results demonstrate that early after the onset of ischemia, there was an increase in the TQ signal intensity in the ischemic hemisphere, and a negligible change in the single quantum (SQ) signal intensity

An extension of the "UNaliasing by Fourier encoding the Overlaps using the temporaL Dimension" (UNFOLD) method to the excitation domain (XUNFOLD) is presented to improve the temporal resolution of multishot tailored RF (TRF) pulses. Multishot three-dimensional TRF pulses were designed to produce a time series of images with periodically aliased excitation profiles. The XUNFOLD method is shown to remove the excitation profile aliasing from the dynamic imaging data by filtering in the temporal frequency dimension. The technique is demonstrated to improve the temporal resolution of simulated functional MRI (fMRI) activation in a time series of brain images.

This study examined whether the severity of cerebral white matter abnormalities (evident on MR images as white matter hyperintensities (WMH)) was related to the cognitive performance of 141 high-functioning older adults. The elderly showed the typical age decrement on measures of processing speed, working memory, and inhibition; however WMH severity was significantly related only to processing speed. The strength of this relationship was, however, influenced by the educational level of the participants, such that processing speed was more associated with WMH severity in less-educated than in well-educated participants. This is consistent with recent concepts of cognitive reserve, but does raise a question as to the underlying source of the cognitive decrement found in the sort of well-educated elders typically used in cognitive-aging studies.

The pathology associated with late-stage dementia in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection has been studied extensively. Neuropathological examination has demonstrated abundant activation and infection of macrophages/microglia termed HIV encephalitis. For obvious reasons, less is known regarding the neuropathology of minor cognitive impairment seen in earlier stages of HIV infection. The authors examined the utility of the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor ligand PK11195 in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to assess microglial/macrophage activation in the brains of HIV-infected subjects with minor neurocognitive impairment in a cross-sectional study of 12 HIV infected individuals and 5 age-matched noninfected controls. Subjects were given a battery of neuropsychological tests in addition to assessing CD4 T-cell count and peripheral viremia followed by contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and PET with [15O]H2O followed by [11C](R)-PK11195. Two of the six neurocognitively impaired HIV-infected subjects demonstrated plasma viral breakthrough, whereas only one of six nonimpaired individuals demonstrated plasma viral load near the limits of detection. MRI demonstrated no abnormal enhancement and although atrophy was more prominent in impaired subjects, it was also present though to a lesser extent in nonimpaired subjects. None of the 12 HIV-infected subjects demonstrated increased retention of [11C](R)-PK11195 in the brain parenchyma compared to the 5 controls. These results suggest that either [11C](R)-PK11195 PET assessment is insensitive to the degree of macrophage activation in HIV-associated minor neurocognitive impairment or macrophage activation is not the pathological substrate of this neurological condition.

A new k-space direct matrix inversion (DMI) method is proposed here to accelerate non-Cartesian SENSE reconstructions. In this method a global k-space matrix equation is established on basic MRI principles, and the inverse of the global encoding matrix is found from a set of local matrix equations by taking advantage of the small extension of k-space coil maps. The DMI algorithm's efficiency is achieved by reloading the precalculated global inverse when the coil maps and trajectories remain unchanged, such as in dynamic studies. Phantom and human subject experiments were performed on a 1.5T scanner with a standard four-channel phased-array cardiac coil. Interleaved spiral trajectories were used to collect fully sampled and undersampled 3D raw data. The equivalence of the global k-space matrix equation to its image-space version, was verified via conjugate gradient (CG) iterative algorithms on a 2x undersampled phantom and numerical-model data sets. When applied to the 2x undersampled phantom and human-subject raw data, the decomposed DMI method produced images with small errors (< or = 3.9%) relative to the reference images obtained from the fully-sampled data, at a rate of 2 s per slice (excluding 4 min for precalculating the global inverse at an image size of 256 x 256). The DMI method may be useful for noise evaluations in parallel coil designs, dynamic MRI, and 3D sodium MRI with fixed coils and trajectories.

This article presents a small-flip-angle, three-dimensional tailored RF pulse that excites thin slices with an adjustable quadratic in-plane spatial variation. The quadratic spatial variation helps to compensate for the loss in image uniformity using a volume coil at 3 T due to the wavelike properties of the RF field. The pulse is based on a novel "fast-kz" design that uses a series of slice-select subpulses along kz and phase encoding "blips" along kx-ky. The method is demonstrated by acquiring a series of 5-mm-thick T2-weighted images of the human brain at 3 T using pulses 4.8 ms in length with a 45 degrees flip angle.