Principal Investigator: Dennis L. Parker, Ph.D., University of Utah, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Co-Investigator: Douglas Christensen, Ph.D., University of Utah, Department of Bioengineering

Award: $79,936

Funding Period: February 1, 2008 – January 31, 2009

Abstract: Accurate, near-real-time temperature measurements are essential for effective monitoring of all types of thermal therapies. Current methods are too slow, subject to substantial errors from motion and fail in fat. We propose: 1) To develop a modification of the PRF technique to allow simultaneous measurement of proton longitudinal relaxation rate, T1. 2) To continue the implementation of model-based linear predictive techniques to utilize the best estimate of tissue thermal properties and linear predictive filtering (e.g. Kalman filter) to obtain the current estimate of the temperature distribution from the prior temperature distribution. Tissue thermal properties will be estimated based upon segmentation from multiple MRI contrasts  

Progress Report: Final progress report

Publications:

1. Temporally constrained reconstruction applied to MRI temperature data