Improving the resolution of brain blood flow imaging with advanced MRI acquisitions and computation

Brad Sutton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

The Blue Waters resource will enable our group to advance the capabilities of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for determining brain structure, examining changes to microvascular (including capillary-level) blood flow in the brain, and visualizing changes in blood flow and structure with age. Since the development of MRI imaging, data has traditionally been acquired in a manner to enable quick image reconstructions using Fast Fourier Transforms. This has limited the achievable spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and imaging speed that MRI can achieve for understanding how the brain is organized and how it changes with age, which is the focus of the Sutton lab. We have been developing techniques (acquisition and image reconstruction approaches) that allow us to achieve sub-mm spatial resolution of the entire brain with image contrast related to moving tissues (water diffusing or blood flowing). However, the non-Cartesian acquisitions, multiple receiver coils, under-sampled images, and magnetic field distributions require complicated image reconstructions that can take orders-of-magnitude more time to reconstruct than the data took to acquire. Blue Waters will enable us to eliminate the image reconstruction bottleneck and advance the next generation of MRI imaging technologies.