PULMONARY KINEMATICS FROM HYPERPOLARIZED HELIUM-3 TAGGED MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING

Recent innovations in hyperpolarized helium-3 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) include the employment of MR tagging techniques for assessment of pulmonary deformation. Historically, such tagging methods have been successfully applied to cardiac research inspiring the development of computational techniques for the quantitative analysis of myocardial deformation. We present related research which concerns the calculation of kinematic quantities, such as displacement and strain, in the lung. Utilizing the high contrast tag lines as landmarks in the images and a recently developed fast n-D B-spline approximation algorithm, we fit a parametric object to the sparse tag line data to smoothly interpolate the underlying deformation field and, subsequently, extract lung kinematic information. We present results from a single human volunteer