Browsing by Subject "MRI phantoms"

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    Effects of biopsy clips on pharmacokinetic analysis of DCE-MRI data in breast cancer
    (2020-05-08) Lydick, Hayden Brewster; Yankeelov, Thomas E.
    Breast biopsy clips are frequently present in the field of view (FOV) of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the breast. These clips, typically ranging in size from 2 – 4 mm in length, are inserted by a radiologist during a primary tumor biopsy, and may remain in the FOV for all subsequent scan sessions. As most breast biopsy clips are constituted of non-ferromagnetic metal, they are broadly labeled as “MRI Safe” and can be imaged with little or no discomfort from the patient. However, the susceptibility difference will induce significant artifacts in MRI. Currently, radiologists are trained to ignore these distortions in traditional MRI scans. However, with the increased use of quantitative imaging methods such as dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) to inform and evaluate treatment, the susceptibility effects from non-ferromagnetic metal in the FOV cannot be ignored. These distortions become increasingly important during therapy as common treatments seek to shrink the size of large masses prior to surgical removal or further imaging studies. Therefore, it is necessary to characterize the effects of these clips on DCE-MRI in a controlled manner. To proceed in this fashion, we designed a novel phantom setup consisting of a set of traditional T1 phantoms to characterize the effects of susceptibility artifacts on DCE-MRI pharmacokinetic parameters. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of multiple material types to form the phantoms, evaluate the deviations in pharmacokinetic parameters from clip artifacts, and compare this to quantitative measurements of susceptibility artifacts from breast biopsy clips. We ultimately determine that the current phantom construct method is not able to effectively capture the error introduced by the breast biopsy clips and discuss several paths to improving and stabilizing this design