Francesca Pennati1,
James D. Quirk2, Yulin V. Chang3, Dmitriy A. Yablonskiy2,
Richard A. Pierce4, Mario Castro4, Andrea Aliverti1,
Jason C. Woods2
1Bioingegneria,
Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy; 2Radiology, Washington
University, St Louis, MO, United States; 3Radiology, Washington
University in Saint Louis, St Louis, MO, United States; 4Internal
Medicine, Washington University, St Louis, MO, United States
Evaluation of regional ventilation is of major importance in investigating lung function in health and disease. In this study, parenchymal signal change between different lung volumes, acquired with VIBE sequences, was proposed to measure regional ventilation. In a range of patients with obstructive pulmonary diseases, proton signal difference was compared with the corresponding 3He ventilation images and with healthy. We demonstrated the feasibility of conventional proton MRI, combined with image registration, to quantify regional ventilation, emerging as a new clinical and research tool to identify structure-function relationships with no need for special equipment and with no ionizing radiation.
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