New technology could cut MRI scan times

The technology was recently licensed by Siemens

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Healthineers. MRI scanners equipped with the novel compressed sensing technologies operate much more quickly than MRI scanners currently in use. Siemens Healthineers applied compressed sensing technology to help solve a clinical problem: how to reduce long scan times while maintaining high diagnostic quality. The result is the first clinical application using compressed sensing technology for cardiovascular imaging and was approved for clinical use in February by the Food and Drug Administration.

Thanks to "compressed sensing" technology, which was developed in part at Rice, scans of the beating heart can be completed in as few as 25 seconds while the patient breathes freely. In contrast, in an MRI scanner equipped with conventional acceleration techniques, patients must lie still for four minutes or more and hold their breath for as many as seven to 12 times throughout a cardiovascular-related procedure.

In the future, compressed sensing might change the way MRIs of the abdomen are performed. Today, certain populations like pediatric patients or patients with labored breathing have to be excluded from having abdominal MRIs due to their inability to perform long, consecutive and exhausting breath-holds. With compressed sensing, the amount of data required for an image of excellent diagnostic quality may be reduced dramatically, potentially enabling free-breathing, contrast-enhanced imaging of the abdomen in one continuous run. This may allow clinicians to reliably perform abdominal MRIs on more patients with high reproducibility and consistency.

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-technology-mri-scan.html