Pulmonary MRI Using Ultra Short /Zero TE Sequences

Overview

Modern imaging modalities, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have greatly advanced in recent years. Through technical advances, proton-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has steadily increased in use to assess pulmonary structures in the pediatric population especially in Europe. Such technical developments have advanced by overcoming rapid decaying of transverse relaxation time and cardiac/chest movement synchronization, showing MRI to be feasible with respect to morphological and functional assessment of pulmonary impairment, in chronic lung disease such as cystic fibrosis for disease progression and prediction of exacerbation. However pulmonary imaging with MRI has also been feasible to detect pulmonary nodules in malignancies (allowing for spatial resolution).

This prospective study will enable developing/ fine tuning for an optimized ultra-short echo/zero echo MRI sequence to enable pulmonary imaging with assessment of detailed lung structures which is important in patient with chronic lung disease. This will enable radiation sparing through x-ray and computed tomography, especially reduce the accumulation dose in long term follow up imaging of patients with chronic lung disease. Also, detailed pulmonary imaging enables more detailed imaging in comparison to the standard reference of care often using radiographs, can pick up disease prior to clinical symptoms, is a useful tool to assess treatment outcome and can sometimes even prevent chronic changes by early disease diagnosis and rapid treatment. This is of particular interest in patients with chronic lung disease, such as cystic fibrosis, but also other congenital lung diseases such as congenital pulmonary airway malformation (CPAM) or malignant diseases which will otherwise have a second CT imaging to assess the lung. The investigators will recruit healthy volunteers to assess the available MR sequences on the 1.5 T MRI scanner at the IWK health Centre in the Department of Diagnostic Imaging and either fine tune/modify the existing protocol with the help of the MRI technologist and application specialists or build a new sequence according to the most recent literature. The aim is to recruit 15 patients of different age group (aged 3- 18 years old) to assure a robust imaging protocol for all age groups. Especially, the preschool age group can be more challenging due to increased cardiac and respiratory motion, but also the understanding of the diagnostic imaging with guidance of the in house child life support as well as parental guidance and support, the possibility to watch a video on the MRI scanner to distract the patient as best as possible since the aim is to conduct the short pulmonary MRI protocol without the need for sedation.