Innovation of physical property measurement in vivo with MR Fingerprinting and Artificial Intelligence

Project Gist

Development of a novel quantitative measurement using artificial intelligence in MRI.

Keywords

MR fingerprinting, AI, MRI, Quantitative measurement

Background and Purpose

MR fingerprinting is a recently developed method used for MRI to enable fast and accurate measurement of physical properties of water in living life by combining a data acquisition in the MRI with a random encoding and image reconstruction of the data by decoding with a pre-computed dictionary. However, this method can only deal with physical properties that can be simulated. In addition, image reconstruction for this method takes a long time. In this project, we aim to construct a strategy to overcome this limitation by making use of artificial intelligence, in a team including researchers from overseas.

Project Achievements

We invited one of the project members from New York University and developed a transmit coil and a novel receiver coil for a quantitative measurement with MRI. We also held a workshop for dedicated software to control the MRI scanner. Twelve people from six institutes from all over in Japan were invited to the workshop. By using a workstation equipped with a graphic processor unit (GPU), We established a pipeline to improve the image quality of MRI. We also developed a pipeline to generate MR images with a different contrast by using artificial intelligence. Spin-off projects from the SPIRITS projects include Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) and Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research. A number of new collaboration team has been also formed through this project.

Future Prospects

Experiences in the development of fundamental technologies as well as research networks formed in this project will be expanded further to conduct multi-disciplinary researches by combining each of the fundamental methodologies. Financial supports from Grant-in-Aid which were obtained through the SPIRITS research project will be utilized.

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Joint Research/Academic Institutions Abroad

New York University, University of Minnesota

Principal Investigator