Zhiyue J Wang1,2, Yong Jong Park1,2, Youngseob Seo1,2, Michael C Morriss1,2, and Nancy K Rollins1,2
1UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States, 2Children's Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States
Stainless
steel orthodontic appliances are commonly found in adolescents undergoing clinical
brain MRI examinations. They cause severe magnetic susceptibility artifacts and
failure to obtain diagnostic information from many MR techniques. The B0
shimming capability present on clinical MR scanners cannot remove these
artifacts. We have constructed devices for the correction of these artifacts at
1.5 T using small pieces of permanent magnets mounted on intra-oral mouth
guards or an extra-oral mouth-band. The magnetic field from the permanent
magnets cancels the B0 inhomogeneity induced by ferromagnetic
orthodontic appliances, resulting in drastic improvement of MR image quality.