title: A self-reference PRF-shift MR thermometry method utilizing the phase gradient.
abstract: In magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, the most widely used and accurate method for measuring temperature is based on the shift in proton resonance frequency (PRF). However, inter-scan motion and bulk magnetic field shifts can lead to inaccurate temperature measurements in the PRF-shift MR thermometry method. The self-reference PRF-shift MR thermometry method was introduced to overcome such problems by deriving a reference image from the heated or treated image, and approximates the reference phase map with low-order polynomial functions. In this note, a new approach is presented to calculate the baseline phase map in self-reference PRF-shift MR thermometry. The proposed method utilizes the phase gradient to remove the phase unwrapping step inherent to other self-reference PRF-shift MR thermometry methods. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using numerical simulations with temperature distributions following a two-dimensional Gaussian function as well as phantom and in vivo experimental data sets. The results from both the numerical simulations and experimental data show that the proposed method is a promising technique for measuring temperature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Langley
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Potter
authors.forename: Corey
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Phipps
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Qun
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000592:standards*; D011522:Protons; D012015:Reference Standards; D013821:Thermometers
chemical_list: D011522:Protons