Perron, Samuel, Alexei Ouriadov, Krzysztof Wawrzyn, Susannah Hickling, Matthew S. Fox, Hacene Serrai, and Giles Santyr. “Application of a 2D Frequency Encoding Sectoral Approach to Hyperpolarized 129Xe MRI at Low Field.” Journal of Magnetic Resonance 336 (March 2022): 107159.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmr.2022.107159.
Inhaled hyperpolarized 129Xe MRI is a non-invasive and radiation risk free lung imaging method, which can directly measure the business unit of the lung where gas exchange occurs: the alveoli and acinar ducts (lung function). Currently, three imaging approaches have been demonstrated to be useful for hyperpolarized 129Xe MR in lungs: Fast Gradient Recalled Echo (FGRE), Radial Projection Reconstruction (PR), and spiral/cones. Typically, non-Cartesian acquisitions such as PR and spiral/cones require specific data post-processing, such as interpolating, regridding, and density-weighting procedures for image reconstruction, which often leads to smoothing effects and resolution degradation. On the other hand, Cartesian methods such as FGRE are not short-echo time (TE) methods; they suffer from imaging gradient-induced diffusion-weighting of the k-space center, and employ a significant number of radio-frequency (RF) pulses.