Bioengineering Research Partnership

Accomplishments

Research accomplishments during the first four years of the project:

Specific Aim 1

  1. Modeling of SNR, require absolute power, and examination of definition of 90o at high fields in the human head as a function of field strength.
  2. Distribution of SNR and SAR for a surface coil adjacent to an anatomically accurate human body.
  3. Modeling and experimental comparison of SNR and signal distribution at 7 versus 4 Tesla.
  4. Modeling and experimental comparison of magnetic field mapping at 3 T in a Birdcage coil in a human head.
  5. Analysis of the wave behavior of head size objects in lossy dielectric samples at high field.
  6. Analysis of excitation and reception distributions near a surface coil at 300MHz: an experimental confirmation of the theory of reciprocity.
  7. Analysis of the behavior of the polarization in spherical phantoms and the human head at high fields using dual surface coils for quaduature detection at 7T.
  8. Theoretical and experimental study of a birdcage coil with detached end caps at 3 T.
  9. Analysis of spatial resolution of numerical models of the human body and relation to the calculated SAR at 64 MHz.
  10. Analysis of the end ring and shield configurations on Birdcage type coils on fields in the human head.
  11. Analysis of temperature and SAR in the human head in volume and surface coils at 64 and 300 MHz.
  12. Model of local temperature change in brain upon functional activations.
  13. Phantom designs for lower field magnets to predict the field behavior at higher field strengths.
  14. Analysis of central brightening due to constructive interference with, without, and despite dielectric resonance.
  15. Single channel multiple animal coil for high field utilizing a homogeneous zero mode TEM coil.

 

Specific Aim 2

  1. Removal of local field gradient distortion during BOLD imaging in rat head and neck tumors.
  2. Numerical calculations of the static field in a three-dimensional multi-tissue human head.
  3. Study of two dimensional prolate spheroidal wave functions for MRI.
  4. Reduction of magnetic field inhomogeneities with the combination of SENSE and GESEPI at high field.
  5. Magnetic resonance imaging study of human olfaction and normal aging with static field distortion correction.