Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Elastography via GPU-Accelerators

John Georgiadis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) is an emerging MR imaging modality for staging neurodegenerative diseases and acute cerebral trauma. It is currently being used to stage liver fibrosis in a clinical settings, replacing invasive biopsies, by applying an external mechanical actuation and measuring the material response to obtain tissue properties. In both chronic and acute brain diseases, MRE will be used as a similar guide for measuring the effect of neurological diseases on neuronal microstructure, but brain tissue measurements are complicated by the inaccessibility of the brain, subtle differences between similar diseases, and the inherently anisotropic neuron microstructure. The goal of the exploratory project is to build computational tools, with an emphasis on GPU accelerators, for handling larger data throughput from higher resolution imaging, joint estimation from multiple complimentary displacement states, and incorporating more accurate material models towards the goal of increasing the clinical specificity of brain MRE.