Advanced Clinical Imaging Technology - ACIT

ALT The field of diffusion MRI is much richer than diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). There is significant value in retrieving specific information about features such as cellular density, morphology, characteristic sizes, myelination, etc. This is the challenge that the field of microstructural MRI has taken on, with remarkable progress and success stories over the past few years. Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) can provide complementary information to DTI about tissue microstructure. For example, in voxel-based or ROI-based analyses, kurtosis metrics can identify differences between patients and controls in brain regions where DTI metrics do not. DKI is thus used to improve the detection of brain changes during, for instance, development, aging, early psychosis and schizophrenia, cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, glioma, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and prostate and other body applications.

ALT Low-field MRI scanners are currently experiencing a renaissance, thanks to technical innovations in gradient construction, coil design, and AI-based reconstruction methods. Advantages over the 1.5T and 3T scanners include clinical scenarios where imaging using scanners with higher field strengths encounters technical limitations. This is especially the case when imaging patients with metal implants where susceptibility artifacts are expected to be substantially less severe at 0.55T. This may be of particular interest in clinical routine, given an aging global population with an associated higher prevalence of metal implants, e.g., following joint replacement surgery. The authors show that reducing metal-implant-related susceptibility artifacts allows for improved assessment of structures and soft tissues immediately adjacent to the implants, which is of particular importance for detecting local recurrence following tumor resections.