Method for simultaneous multiple magnetic resonance parameter mapping of liver

Abstract

The disclosure provides a modified EPI sequence for acquiring multi-shot and multi-echo images with interleaved blip-up and blip-down phase encoding; the blip-up and blip-down images are processed by topup in FSL to estimate the inhomogeneous main magnetic field Bmap that causes image distortions; the Bmap is then incorporated into the encoding matrix with a low rank constraint to form a joint reconstruction model; the joint reconstruction model is solved to obtain multiple distortion-free images; and the multiple distortion-free images are matched to dictionary to simultaneous acquire the quantitative T(=1/R) and T*(=1/R*) maps. In the phantom and in-vivo measurements, the disclosed method rapidly acquires the comparable quantitative images within one hold-breath (for 20 s) to the conventional mapping method, thus providing important practical application value for evaluation of liver damage, iron level and cancer lesion.