Bruno Madore1, Matthew Toews1, Chang-Sheng Mei1, Renxin Chu1, W. Scott Hoge1, Lawrence P. Panych1
1Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States
MR-guidance for thermal ablation therapy in moving organs such as the liver is a challenging application, as it requires tracking the region targeted for ablation while simultaneously measuring temperature in and around it. A pulse sequence was implemented that presents advantages over regular gradient-echo and echo-planar sequences, both in its ability to enable motion tracking and to detect temperature changes. A software system was developed combining fast landmark-based image tracking and temperature calculation, and users were asked to visually judge the performance of the software as applied to in vivo data.