Recently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely used to investigate the structures and functions of the human brain in health and disease in vivo. However, there are growing concerns about the test-retest reliability of structural and functional measurements derived from MRI data. Here, we present a test-retest dataset of multi-modal MRI including structural MRI (S-MRI), diffusion MR...

PURPOSE To test quantitative functional lung MRI techniques in young adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) compared to healthy volunteers and to monitor immediate treatment effects of a single inhalation of hypertonic saline in comparison to clinical routine pulmonary function tests. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sixteen clinically stable CF patients and 12 healthy volunteers prospectively underwent two f...

The technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging is rapidly moving from one of technical interest to wide clinical application. However, there are a number of questions regarding the method that need resolution. Some of these are investigated in this thesis. High resolution fMRI is demonstrated at 3.0 T, using an interleaved echo planar imaging technique to keep image distortion low. The ...

Renal function is characterized by different physiologic aspects, including perfusion, glomerular filtration, interstitial diffusion, and tissue oxygenation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) shows great promise in assessing these renal tissue characteristics noninvasively. The last decade has witnessed a dramatic progress in MRI techniques for renal function assessment. This article briefly des...

Imaging of the pulmonary parenchyma represents a unique challenge for MRI. Limited signal is caused by low proton density, susceptibility artefacts, and physiological motion (cardiac pulsation, respiration). Improvements in MRI techniques have extended the potential for investigations of pulmonary parenchymal disease with the evaluation of lung perfusion. More recently inhalation of non proton-...

Blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is conventionally done by reconstructing 2 -weighted images. However, since the images are unitless they are nonquantifiable in terms of important physiological parameters. An alternative approach is to reconstruct 2 maps which are quantifiable and have comparable BOLD contrast as 2 -weighted images. However, conve...

Diffusion MRI has been introduced in 1985 and has had a very successful life on its own. While it has become a standard for imaging stroke and white matter disorders, the borders between diffusion MRI and the general field of fMRI have always remained fuzzy. First, diffusion MRI has been used to obtain images of brain function, based on the idea that diffusion MRI could also be made sensitive t...

Most would agree that knowing precisely what was happening in the brain during the act of thinking would help in our pursuit to understand what thinking really is. This chapter describes the basics, limits, and future directions of one of the more effective tools we have to observe the human brain while it is functioning – functional MRI. Functional MRI emerged in the early 1990s, and has since...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to implement convenient, fast, and accurate Mandarin task paradigms for functional MRI, and to locate the Chinese language functional areas in frontal and temporal lobes. MATERIALS AND METHODS Nineteen healthy Chinese volunteers participated in this study, which utilized a block design with four language tasks: auditory naming (AN), picture naming (PN...