Golden-angle RAdial Sparse Parallel MRI (GRASP)

284 Pages·2015·8.7 MB·English

by  Li Feng

Rapid and Continuous Magnetic Resonance
Imaging Using Compressed Sensing
by
Li Feng
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of The Requirements for The Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Basic Medical Science
Program in Biomedical Imaging
New York University
May, 2015
____________________
Daniel K. Sodickson, MD, PhD
____________________
Ricardo Otazo, PhD
UMI Number: 3716516
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DEDICATION

To my whole family, for their infinite love and support.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I started my MRI journey at NYU School of Medicine in May 2008
when I was a Master student. The past seven years that I spent here gave
me lots of memories and I owe my gratitude to many people who both
helped me in my studies and research and enriched my life in New York
City. The support, generosity and love from those people have made the
past many years a wonderful part of my life and will be deeply embedded in
my memory forever.
The first two people I would like to thank are Dr. Daniel Sodickson
and Dr. Ricardo Otazo. I am very grateful to have advising from both of
them in my PhD study. Dan’s enthusiasm for research and his passion in
both teaching and presentation are very impressive and encouraging to
inspire me throughout my whole PhD study. Dan gave me tremendous
freedom and kept encouraging me to actively think and test my own ideas
for research. He always gave me great feedback to guide my research
towards the direction that could solve practical problems. All of these
enabled me to grow rapidly and helped me develop good research
independence. Moreover, Dan welcomes any questions and critiques from
the students, and of course always gives excellent advices and answers
whenever we need. He is such a wonderful advisor and role model that all
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the students can rely upon. On the other hand, Ricardo is really a wonderful
mentor who taught me lots of hands-on skills and helped me with all the
details in my research. My PhD study in the past many years would not
have been so productive without the support from Ricardo and it was such
a fabulous experience working with him. Ricardo was always available
whenever I needed his help. I could knock at his office door directly without
an appointment for discussions and he always welcomed me without any
hesitation. I enjoyed all the discussion with him, in which his critical thinking
and depth of knowledge were extremely helpful in my research. Meanwhile,
Ricardo is such an excellent presenter in giving a talk, and I have learnt a
lot from him in how to make good slides and how to tell a good story in a
presentation.
Dr. Daniel Kim deserves lots of my gratitude. Dan was my first
mentor in the MRI world and he is the person who brought me into this field
when I was still a Master student. I am so grateful and feel so lucky that he
accepted me as a summer intern in 2008 to work with him on a cardiac MRI
project. Dan taught me many things that all beginners need to learn,
including how to use the MRI scanners, how to perform a cardiac MRI
exam, how to efficiently debug a program and how to make good figures for
a paper. His patience and step-by-step guidance in my first MRI project
helped me grow up quickly from a “raw” novice and led to my first lead-
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author paper published in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (MRM) and first
oral presentation acceptance at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the
International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), even
before I started the PhD study. Although he moved to Utah in the summer
of 2011 and it is hard to meet and talk to him now, I will never forget those
days that we worked together in his office and the scanner rooms in the
later evenings.
I would like to also thank Jian Xu from Siemens Healthcare USA for
his infinite support in both research and living. Jian was the first few people
I met when I came to the US in 2007. He was the first person I have known
in the MRI field and was the person who introduced me to NYU School of
Medicine. I enjoyed those countless weekends I spent with him in the MRI
scanner room. He taught me many things about sequences and cardiac
MRI, and gave me tremendous support in cardiac MRI sequences for my
research. I feel very lucky to be good friends with him.
I am grateful for Drs. Leon Axel and Hersh Chandarana, who gave
me clinical advising in my PhD study. They always pointed out practical
clinical needs for me and guided me to find good solutions for them. I also
appreciate their great support for clinical patient studies in both cardiac and
abdominal MRI.
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Special thanks go to Drs. Tobias Block and Florian Knoll from NYU,
Robert Grimm from University of Erlangen, and Dr. Jing Liu from UCSF. I
started working with Tobias in 2011 and I was happy that he joined NYU in
the end of 2011 and brought his radial imaging sequence here. My
dissertation could not have been finished without his support on radial
sequences. Meanwhile, I also learnt a lot from Tobias’ critical thinking and
attitude in research. Robert is Tobias’s PhD student and I enjoyed the time
we spent together here at NYU in 2012. His great effort led to successful
application of our compressed sensing approaches for clinical studies.
Florian shared his GPU implementation of 3D non-Cartesian gridding with
me and this was extremely helpful for the 3D radial imaging reconstructions
in my research. I was very lucky that I could be always the first person who
has access to his latest version of 3D non-Cartesian gridding code. Jing is
an expert in both cardiac imaging and radial imaging at UCSF. She gave
me lots of help, suggestions in both my research projects and career
planning.
We started the collaboration with Dr. Matthias Stuber’s research
group at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2014. I am very
grateful to the whole team at Lausanne, including Dr. Matthias Stuber, Dr.
Davide Piccini, Simone Coppo, Gabriele Bonanno and many others, for the
opportunity to have this wonderful collaboration. Davide provided me with
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support for the 3D golden-angle spiral phyllotaxis sequence; Simone and
Gabriele were always willing to share so many coronary MRA datasets with
me without any hesitation and gave me great help with coronary artery MR
image post-processing. All of these valuable supports helped me finish the
last part of my dissertation very quickly. I believe our collaboration will
continue to be fruitful and can keep moving forward successfully in the
future.
I want to thank Dr. Ruth Lim for her help in the evaluation of MRI
image quality in many of my projects. Her response was always very fast,
and she gave me very helpful comments from a clinical point of view. I hope
we would have more opportunities in the future to work together on more
projects.
I would like to thank rest of my Committee members, including Dr.
Christopher Collins, Dr. Riccardo Lattanzi and Dr. Reza Nezafat. It is my
great honor to have Dr. Reza Nezafat from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center at Harvard Medical School joins my Committee team as my external
dissertation reviewer.
In additional to the people who gave me direct support in research, I
need to express my gratitude to many lab mates and friends at NYU School
of Medicine, including Ding Xia, Cem Deniz, Leeor Alon, Gene Cho, Gang
Chen, Manushka Vaidya, Gillian Haemer, Alicia Yang, Nicole Wake,
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Gregory Lemberskiy Ke Zhang, Hong-Hsi Lee, Harikrishna Rallapalli and
Yuan Wang. These friends enriched my life in the lab and always gave me
great suggestions, help, positive energy and encouragement whenever I
needed them. I would like to specially thank Alicia, Nicole and Gillian, who
gave me great help in proofreading of the dissertation and language editing
in general. I also need to thank many friends in the Chinese Student and
Scholar Association (CSSA) of NYU Medical Center. I will never forget the
times we spent together for karaoke and poker games.
Finally, my greatest gratitude goes to my wife, my parents and all my
other family members. I would not have been able to finish my study without
their infinite support, encouragement and love.

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