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An important drawback of Magnetic resonance (MR) is speed, and a number of methods have been developed over the years to speed up acquisition. Two related families of ultrafast acquisition methods based on ‘Spatiotemporal Encoding’ (SPEN) — replacing the standard Fourier encoding/decoding — have been developed in our group, of Prof. Lucio Frydman. The first, for NMR spectroscopy, accomplishes single scan acquisitions of 2D spectra, thus enabling orders of magnitude acceleration compared to traditional NMR spectroscopy. This acceleration enables, for example, to follow dynamic process in real time using 2D NMR spectroscopy. The second family of methods, for MRI, includes a number of ‘Hybrid-SPEN’ variants. Although no acceleration is achieved by Hybrid-SPEN compared to standard, also ultrafast, echo planar imaging (EPI) sequences, much greater robustness to magnetic field inhomogeneities is achieved, thus resolving an important handicap of EPI. Despite their benefits, these two SPEN methods suffer from hardware inaccuracies, as does EPI, that have required manual intervention for reconstructing final high-quality spectra (NMR case), or images (MRI case).

I shall present the work I have done to (i) develop automatic and easy to use tools for correcting the spectrum and image artifacts (resulting from the above hardware imperfections). (ii) Combine SPEN-based 2D spectroscopy principles with imaging principles to develop spatiotemporally encoded spectroscopic imaging (SPENSI): a new MRSI sequence with larger spectral bandwidths and even faster acquisitions than existing options.