Patent ID: 9547058
Date: 2017-01-17
CPC Classifications: G01R

Claim:
1. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system comprising: an MRI gantry having static and gradient magnet assemblies and at least one radio frequency (RF) coil defining an image volume into which a patient region of interest (ROI) can be disposed; MRI control circuits connected to control components within said MRI gantry and configured to effect MRI data acquisition sequences of RF and gradient magnetic pulses and thereby elicit MRI signals from patient tissue when an ROI is disposed therein, the MRI control circuits also being configured to acquire and process said elicited MRI signals, in at least one MRI processor, into MR image data; said at least one MRI processor and MRI control circuits being configured to (a) acquire k-space data of a patient ROI over a predetermined band of RF frequencies using the at least one RF coil and RF excitation pulses having respectively corresponding RF frequencies that are incrementally offset from a nuclear magnetic resonant (NMR) Larmor frequency of free nuclei thus causing chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) effects and to process this acquired k-space data into Z-spectra data at plural voxels in the ROI; (b) analyze the processed Z-spectra data with the at least one MRI processor in order to provide spectral peak width data corresponding to at least one of T2 or T2* tissue values in the ROI that represent macromolecules participating in the magnetization transfer contrast (MTC) effects which produced said Z-spectra data; and (c) store and/or display, with a memory and/or a graphical user interface (GUI) connected to the at least one MRI processor, data representative of at least one of T2 or T2* tissue values of the ROI, based on said spectral peak width data, in which the T2 or T2* values are different for different tissues.