Abstract #3348

Peng H, Chen W, Huang T, Wu C, Tseng W, Chung H

The utilization of MRI for guiding high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) beams can not only greatly increase the localized accuracy during HIFU heating procedures but also can be used to evaluate the HIFU-induced lesions after treatments. Our study investigated the feasibility of estimating temperature changes and magnetization transfer (MT) contrast simultaneously during HIFU heating treatments, using an interleaved dual gradient-echo technique which reflected heating conditions and degree of protein denaturation. Experiments on temperature-varying and HIFU-treated gel phantoms demonstrated that the method exhibited high precision in temperature measurements and expected trends in MT ratio variations.