Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:14:22 -0400
electrical-engineering, graduate, news, research, talks

EE Graduate Seminar

From Proton to Image: A Signal Processing Aspect of MRI

Albert Kir
PhD (EE) Student, CSEE Dept/UMBC

11:30am-12:45pm Friday, 20 April 2012, ITE 237

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is routinely used in clinical setting for its great diagnosis and prognosis ability, and is a heavily studied research area across multiple disciplines. MRI has its tie with signal and imaging processing community since it stemmed from the study of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The technique of Fourier imaging makes MRI possible through manipulation of the NMR signals. The issue of imaging speed has always been at the heart of functional MRI (fMRI) and interventional imaging, where a high image frame rate is required or preferable. In the past decade, partly owing to the advance in imaging hardware, a wide range of image reconstruction algorithms have been developed to accelerate the image acquisition process. There has been SENSE, SMASH, GRAPPA, and many of their variations in the parallel imaging category from the early days to the current K-T techniques based on compressive sensing (CS). In this talk, the basic imaging principle for MRI will first be presented, and then a discussion of the first parallel imaging technique, SENSE, will be given. Lastly, the use of K-T FOCUSS on fMRI will be demonstrated.

Albert Kir received the BS degree in Computer Engineering n 2005 and the MSEE degree in 2009 from UMBC. He is currently a PhD (EE) student at UMBC. Mr. Kirs current research interest includes optimization of rapid imaging techniques for structural and functional images for MRI.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris