Microwave seminar | 22 February 2021

 
Dr. David Waddington
The University of Sydney
Deconstructing MRI: Rebuilding the MR pipeline to enable new image-guided therapies with low-field scanners, MRI-Linacs and hyperpolarizers
Abstract

Clinical MRI scanners operating at high magnetic fields are well established as the gold-standard for diagnostic softtissue imaging. The last decade has seen an explosion in new MRI platforms outside this domain, from portable, low-field (<0.1 T) MRI scanners to MRI-Linacs, which are devices integrating MRI with linear accelerators for radiotherapy. Such new devices are poised to, respectively, transform stroke care in remote communities and dramatically increase the accuracy of targeted cancer treatments. In this talk I will describe my work with low-field MRI, explaining how RF hardware requirements change and how new contrast mechanisms are enabled in the low-field regime. I will conclude with my work on MRI-Linacs, discussing my research using artificial intelligence to enable real-time MR image acquisition and reconstruction for tumour tracking in radiotherapy.