Novel MRI Sequence- MR Fingerprinting

University of North Carolina (UNC)

Status

Completed

Conditions

Disease

Treatments

Device: MR Fingerprinting

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT03722459

17-2731

Details and patient eligibility

About

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become one of most important medical imaging tools over the past 30 years because it is non-invasive, requires no ionizing radiation, and provides exquisite images of soft tissues and anatomic structures with many tissue/disease specific contrasts. While MRI has served the community well for many years, it is increasingly clear that it also has significant limitations.

One of the principle limitations is the lack of quantitative information for tissue/structure characterization. The current paradigm of MRI is to use a set of scanner settings to generate an image "weighted" by a specific MR contrast mechanism (physical parameter), where it is hoped that variations in the parameter will be accentuated. However, without quantitative knowledge of the parameters, the final image contrast may depend on many factors, which complicates image interpretation and diagnostic performance. Quantitative measurement can provide a great deal of information about tissue properties and pathological conditions, since these parameters ultimately determine the contrast that is observed in conventional images.

Full description

The purpose of this study is to evaluate novel quantitative MRI techniques in clinical studies to determine whether they can provide better, faster and more useful information for clinical diagnosis. In this study, the investigators propose to apply MR Fingerprinting and evaluate its performance for different diseases. These include, but are not limited to, diseases in the liver, kidney, cardiac, pancreas etc. The investigators hypothesize that the quantitative MR Fingerprinting imaging technique will lead to improved tissue characterization and diagnosis.

Enrollment

22 patients

Sex

All

Ages

18 to 99 years old

Volunteers

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

The study will include English-speaking patients that are already scheduled to undergo a clinical MRI for diagnostic purposes.

Exclusion criteria

Pregnant women will be excluded.
Women will be excluded from the healthy volunteers, due to a lack of funding for pregnancy testing. Funding for this will be considered for the future.