Advance makes MRI scans more than seven times faster

BERKELEY — An international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible.

Series of fMRI brain scans showing new acceleration techniquesfMRI brain scans without the new acceleration techniques (top row) and with increasing numbers of multiplexings and slice accelerations. The bottom row was obtained seven times faster than the top row, although all show similar resolution. Only 4 of the 60 slices of a full, 3-D brain scan are shown. (David Feinberg/UC Berkeley)
In a paper that appeared Dec. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the United Kingdom describe two improvements that allow full three-dimensional brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical 2 to 3 seconds.

"When we made the first images, it was unbelievable how fast we were going," said first author David Feinberg, a physicist and adjunct professor in UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and president of the company Advanced MRI Technologies in Sebastopol, Calif. "It was like stepping out of a prop plane into a jet plane. It was that magnitude of difference."

For neuroscience, in particular, fast scans are critical for capturing the dynamic activity in the brain.

"When a functional MRI study of the brain is performed, about 30 to 60 images covering the entire 3-D brain are repeated hundreds of times like the frames of a movie but, with fMRI, a 3-D movie," Feinberg said. "By multiplexing the image acquisition for higher speed, a higher frame rate is achieved for more information in a shorter period of time."

source: University of California - Berkley