Author: Anita Dushyanth

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13:

The body motion of patients during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) causes significant artifacts in the reconstructed image. Artifacts are manifested as a motion induced blur and ghost repetitions of the moving structures, which obscure vital anatomical and pathological detail. The techniques that have been proposed for suppressing motion artifacts fall into two major categories. Realtime techniques that attempt to prevent the motion from corrupting the data by restricting the data acquisition times or motion of the patients, and post-processing techniques that use information embedded in the corrupted data to restore the image. The post-processing techniques usually demand an appropriate model of the motion that requires the parameters be determined in order to invert the data degradation process. However, motion is manifested differently depending on the time and duration it occurred during Magnetic Resonance (MR) data acquisition. Estimating motion parameters from such cases are heavily based on assumptions and the reconstructed image is compromised on either contrast or resolution. A major challenge in high resolution MR imaging of the orbit (eyeball and associated tissues in the eye socket) is image degradation by artifacts resulting from eye movements and eyelid blinks. In this thesis a novel method for motion correction has been developed by incorporating an optical sensor that detects these eye movements during MR scan acquisition without generating signal artifacts, and which is not affected by either the strong static magnetic field or the pulsed field gradients. Detection of the subjects eye movements and blinks is essential for determining the exact times during the MR scan when each such movement occurred. This thesis presents a method for refining orbital MRI techniques to compensate for the effects of blinking and fixation instability. It employs an eye tracker system to track eye/eyelid movements in the MRI studies of strabismus in humans that is based on infrared (IR) light reflection. It incorporates custom-fabricated optical fiber probes that illuminate the eye with low intensity infrared light, while eye/eyelid movements are detected by changes in ocular surface reflectance transmitted by another optical fiber cable coupled to a photodiode. Additionally, there is another light source that serves as a visible point target for ocular fixation during MRI scanning. The volunteer's eye movements are recorded simultaneously while the orbit is scanned using MRI. The output signal from the detector is amplified and synchronized in time with the MR acquired data. Image data corrupted by motion is flagged so that the affected data can be removed during image reconstruction. The purpose of this experiment is to outline experimental protocols for acquiring and correcting the above mentioned images in high quality, discuss these protocols from a wide range of perspectives, and finally present some observations on pilot data from volunteer subjects as well as patient with pathology. The MRI methodology developed was able to suppress motion artifacts considerably to provide interpretable MRI images.