Francesco Molinari1,2, Grzegorz Bauman3,
Monika Eichinger2, Bernhard Geiger4, Lorenzo Bonomo1,
Hans-Ulrich Kauczor5, Michael Puderbach2
1Department of Bioimaging and
Radiological Sciences, Catholic University of Rome, Rome, Italy; 2Department
of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; 3Department
of Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg,
Germany; 4Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, United States; 5Department
of Radiology, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
In
oxygen-enhanced MRI, lung signal is measured repeatedly during different
breathing cycles. Inconsistencies of respiratory phase may hamper the quality
of the parametric O2-maps. In this study, fully automatic non-rigid
registration was assessed as a postprocessing method to improve the quality
of O2-MRI of the lung. This post-processing technique reduced spatial
misalignment among images and signal variability within the lung. O2-induced
signal enhancement was not influenced by image registration. Spatial
heterogeneity of parametric O2-maps decreased significantly. As such, fully
automatic non-rigid registration appears suitable for improving the quality
of multislice O2-MRI of the lung.