MR-guided interventional procedures can be performed with full patient access with use of an open-configuration, superconducting MR magnet with near real-time imaging and interactive image plane control.

MR-guided biopsy with a frameless stereotaxic technique is safe and accurate. Image feedback is near real time, and the procedure is interactive. These techniques may be used to perform MR-guided biopsies and to place probes for MR-guided therapies.

We tested a dual-energy bone densitometer (LUNAR DPX) that uses a stable x-ray generator and a K-edge filter to achieve the two energy levels. A conventional scintillation detector in pulse-counting mode was used together with a gain stabilizer. The densitometer normally performs spine and femur scans in about 6 minutes and 3 minutes, respectively, with adequate spatial resolution (1.2 x 1.2 mm). Total body scans take either 10 minutes or 20 minutes. The long-term (6 months, n = 195) precision of repeat measurement on an 18-cm thick spine phantom was 0.6% at the medium speed. Precision error in vivo was about 0.6, 0.9 and 1.5% for spine scans (L2-L4) at slow, medium and fast speeds, while the error was 1.2 and 1.5 to 2.0%, respectively, for femur scans at slow and medium speed. The precision of total body bone density was 0.5% in vitro and in vivo. The response to increasing amounts of calcium hydroxyapatite was linear (r = 0.99). The densitometer accurately indicated (within 1%) the actual amount of hydroxyapatite after correction for physiological amounts of marrow fat. The measured area corresponded exactly (within 0.5%) to that of known annuli and to the radiographic area of spine phantoms. There was no significant effect of tissue thickness on mass, area, or areal density (BMD) between 10 and 24 cm of water. The BMD values for both spine and femur in vivo correlated highly (r = 0.98, SEE = .03 g/cm2) with those obtained using conventional 153Gd DPA. Similarly, total body BMD correlated highly (r = 0.96, SEE = .02 g/cm2) with DPA results.

Partial k-space sampling is frequently used in single-shot diffusion-weighted echo-planar imaging (DW-EPI) to reduce the TE and thereby improve the SNR. However, it increases the sensitivity of the technique to bulk rotational motion, which introduces a phase gradient across the tissue that shifts the echo in k-space. If the echo is displaced into the high spatial frequencies, conventional homodyne reconstruction fails, causing intensity oscillations across the image. Zero-padding, on the other hand, compromises the image resolution and may cause truncation artifacts. We present an adaptive version of the homodyne algorithm that detects the location of the echo in k-space and adjusts the center and width of the homodyne filters accordingly. The adaptive algorithm produces artifactfree images when the echo is shifted into the high positive k-space range, and reduces to the standard homodyne algorithm in the absence of bulk motion. Magn Reson Med 57: 614 -619, 2007.

A three-axis uniplanar gradient coil was designed and built to provide order-of-magnitude increases in gradient strength of up to 500 mT/m on the x-and y-axes, and 1000 mT/m for the z-axis at 640 A input over a limited FOV (ϳ16 cm) for superficial regions, compared to conventional gradient coils, with significant gradient strengths extending deeper into the body. The gradient set is practically accommodated in the bore of a conventional whole-body, cylindrical-geometry MRI scanner, and operated using standard gradient supplies