Blood Flow Quantification via MRI

Software and data acquisition techniques will be developed to allow magnetic resonance imagingscanners to act as fully integrated instruments for the combined measurement of vasculature morphology(angiography) with accurate, wide dynamic range blood flow quantification. A new type of mathematicalanalysis and reconstruction procedure based on a modified nonlinear time-frequency distribution will beused to generate a factorization of spin density and motion effects without he problems of lowresolution, interference terms and noise sensitivity of previous methods. The method will also avoid theuse of motion models or assumptions about the complexity of the motion. Preliminary results suggestthe feasibility of the approach, which uses a special pulse sequence and novel reconstruction processing,not available in other approaches or systems. Potential applications exist in a wide range of clinicalproblems involving vascular disorders, preoperative planning and post-procedural efficacy evaluation.The technology will be suitable for commercial implementation in workstation or as embedded licensedsoftware.