Continuously moving table MRI with sliding multislice for rectal cancer staging: Image quality and lesion detection

Comparison of a new whole-body continuous-table-movement protocol versus a standard whole-body MR protocol for the assessment of multiple myeloma

“…6 A 73-year-old female patient. This example shows a patient in whom the assessability of the liver and spleen parenchyma is substantially better with the axial CTM T2-w fs BLADE sequence (a) than with the standard coronal STIR sequence (b) metastases from rectal cancer, detection of lymph node and liver metastases was comparable to multidetector CT with superior ability to detect bone metastases [24,25]. Brauck et al prospectively evaluated a whole-body MRI protocol to help depict metastases by using unenhanced T2-weighted and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted sequences during continuous table movement in comparison to PET/CT.…”

“…In five patients the authors detected all hepatic and pulmonary lesions over 8 mm in diameter using computed tomography as the reference method [36]. Using a Cartesian turbo spin echo STIR sequence, Baumann et al found a sensitivity and specificity of 82 and 95% on a per patient basis for lesions larger than 3 mm in 30 patients with 321 pulmonary nodules compared with multidetector CT [24,25]. In 27 patients with Fig.…”

“…It enables seamless real-time WB MR imaging by permitting continuous table movement during data acquisition. Recently, the technique has been described for MR angiography [19][20][21][22] and oncological imaging [23][24][25][26][27][28]. In recent studies it was possible to show that patient throughput might be increased in the future by using continuous table movement [23].…”

Temporally constrained respiratory gating improves continuously moving table MRI during free breathing

“…Although the presented motion correction algorithm could be combined with various nonsingle‐shot MR sequences, the SMS technique appears a reasonable target to introduce real‐time breathing motion correction to CMT‐MRI . SMS has shown its clinical potential as a CMT‐MRI technique and overcomes several limitations of other CMT implementations by acquiring each slice along the same spatial trajectory in the scanner . Due to the motion‐dependent replacement of k ‐space lines, however, this property of the SMS method does not hold exactly any more.…”

“…Several approaches for breathing motion compensation with CMT‐MRI have been proposed. Despite the long measurement times, breath‐holding techniques can be applied by splitting the whole examination into multiple overlapping acquisitions that can automatically be combined to one seamless volume . Alternatively, patients hold their breath only during those parts of the measurement that cover an area of particular interest .…”