Ante Zhu is the lead author on two recent papers on the development and evaluation of advanced chemical shift encoded (CSE) techniques in quantitative body MRI. The first of these works used ultra-short TE CSE technique to characterize a short-T2* MR signal component in the liver. This short-T2* signal is observed to confound liver fat quantification using CSE techniques with short echo times. Further, the signal fraction and T2* of this short-T2* signal in healthy volunteers and patients with liver cirrhosis were preliminarily quantified at 1.5T and 3.0T.
Imaging of ferumoxytol uptake by macrophages at the maternal-fetal interface in ferumoxytol-enhanced MRI may potentially provide a non-invasive method of characterizing inflammation in preeclampsia. R2* and B0 mapping using current 3D CSE acquisitions, which have been applied to detect iron concentration in ferumoxytol-enhanced MRI, is challenging in the presence of fetal and maternal respiratory motion. The proposed free breathing 2D CSE technique with a small temporal footprint (~3s/slice) is capable of “freezing” these sources of motion. This work demonstrates that 2D CSE provides accurate R2* and B0 measurements in placental imaging.
- Zhu A, Hernando D, Johnson KM and Reeder SB. Characterizing a short T2* signal component in the liver using ultrashort TE chemical shift-encoded MRI at 1.5T and 3.0T. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. 2019 July DOI PMID
- Zhu A, Reeder SB, Johnson KM, Nguyen SM, Golos TG, Shimakawa A, Muehler MR, Francois CJ, Bird IM, Fain SB, Shah DM, Wieben O and Hernando D. Evaluation of a motion-robust 2D chemical shift-encoded technique for R2* and field map quantification in ferumoxytol-enhanced MRI of the placenta in pregnant rhesus macaques. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. 2019 July DOI PMID