Buckle Up: With New Techniques, MRI is Faster than Ever Before

With its exquisite soft-tissue contrast and unique ability to probe brain function, MRI has revolutionized our understanding of the brain in both health and disease. But because of its speed—it acquires scans at a relatively slow clip—it doesn’t always meet the needs of today’s cutting-edge applications.

Kawin Setsompop found a way to change this.

Setsompop, a longtime investigator in the Martinos Center, developed a pair of techniques for MRI that effectively speed up scans, thus yielding dramatically higher imaging resolution. By optimizing the interplay between imaging hardware, MR physics and neuroscience, the techniques enable study of the living, functioning brain at much finer scales than was previously possible. Setsompop says his goal was to increase the sensitivity and efficiency of MRI by an order of magnitude or more.

The advances he has described could have a major impact on healthcare. Implementing them will improve detection of subtle changes in both structure and function in the brain, and this in turn will benefit a range of applications: from basic science applications such as those encompassed by the Human Connectome Project to diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders including multiple sclerosis and epilepsy.

Setsompop’s work in this area dates back to his graduate school days at MIT, when he set out to tackle a problem associated with ultrahigh-field MRI. A relatively new advance at the time, ultrahigh-field MRI suffered from an inherent limitation: the higher field strengths used with the technology led to inhomogeneity in the magnetic field, and this produced artifacts in the image. Hoping to address this—and thus to improve the overall efficacy of the approach—Setsompop and colleagues, including Elfar Adalsteinsson, his PhD advisor at MIT, started developing strategies that could mitigate these effects.

He continued his efforts after joining the Martinos Center as a postdoctoral fellow working with Larry Wald. In 2011, he and colleagues in the Center introduced the first of his strategies to speed up MRI scans: blipped-CAIPI Simultaneous MultiSlice (SMS) imaging. This technique allows investigators to acquire up to ten planes, or “slices,” of brain images at a time—instead of just one— enabling much faster snapshots of brain physiology.

Three years later, Setsompop and his team at the Center introduced Wave-CAIPI SMS, which provides an order of magnitude improvement in data acquisition efficiency for a variety of clinically important MRI scans. This technique enables clinicians to speed up current MRI clinical exams—ultimately leading to reductions in healthcare costs—or to obtain much more detailed scans in the same time it would take to complete a conventional clinical exam, either at 7T or the more conventional 3T.