Final Exam – Material covered

 
• Image reconstruction (filtering / zero padding / SNR / resolution)

How are k-space data related to the image?

What is the Gibbs artefact? What causes it?
Why do we use windowing? What are its pros and cons?

• MPRAGE and the volumetric imaging problem

What is RAGE? What is MPRAGE? What are the parameters for each?
What is the condition for equilibrium (math)? What does it mean?
Be able to set up the equations to calculate the contrast for both RAGE and
MPRAGE.
What is the Point Spread Function? What is its effect on the image?
What is volumetric imaging? Why do we use it?

• Image segmentation

What are the (very) basic techniques used for image segmentation?
How do you choose thresholds?
How do SNR and CNR affect segmentation?

• Image registration

What are the different types of registration that are used?

What are the degrees of freedom, and what do they represent?
How many degrees of freedom would you use if…

• Common image artefacts

Basic MRI artefacts – recognize them and know how to deal with them.

• Quantitative Imaging

What is “quantitative” imaging? What are some of its advantages?

• Magnetization Transfer Imaging

What are hydration layers? What is exchange?

Describe a basic sequence for doing quantitative magnetization transfer
How do you calculate magnetization transfer ratio? What is it indicative of?

• Diffusion Imaging
What is Brownian motion?
What is diffusion?
What is the diffusion law in 3 dimensions?
What is the preparation sequence for diffusion weighting? How does it work?
What is the apparent diffusion coefficient? How is it calculated?
What is fractional anisotropy? What does it mean if it is big/small? How should it
be in white matter / gray matter?

• MR Angiography

What are the main MR Angiography techniques?

Give a sequence for Time of Flight imaging. How does it work?
What are the two main contrast cases that we see during a time of flight
experiment?
Describe how Maximum Intensity Projection works. What are its advantages /
drawbacks?
What is velocity encoding? (Know the math!)

• Perfusion Imaging

What is perfusion?
What is the contrast agent for dynamic susceptibility MRI? How does it work?
How does dynamic susceptibility MRI work?
What is deconvolution? Why do we use it?
CBV/MTT/CBF – what are they, how do we calculate them?
How does arterial spin labeling work? Advantages/disadvantages compared to
dynamic susceptibility MRI? When would you use which one?

• BOLD Imaging: basics of functional imaging

What is the contrast agent for BOLD imaging? What is the basis for its behavior?
What sort of MRI contrast is BOLD imaging based on?
What is the physiological basis of BOLD imaging?
What is the basic format of a fMRI experiment? How are time series formed?
What is a stimulus?
What is the additional stability issue that has an effect in fMRI? How and why?
What are the types of resolution that we are interested in in fMRI? What do they
mean?
What are the main preprocessing steps for fMRI data analysis? Be sure to be
able to describe each one of them!
What is DICOM?
What types of filtering are used in fMRI (both in space and in time)? What are
their effects?
What sort of analysis is used to find activated voxels?

• Parallel Imaging

Comparison between volume coils and surface coils: pros and cons
What is the phased array coil? Advantages/Disadvantages
What is parallel imaging? What can it be used for?
What is the effect in the image if we use reduced k-space sampling?
What are coil sensitivity profiles? How are they acquired?
How can we use the coil sensitivity profiles to correct an aliased image?
What do we gain with accelerated parallel MRI?
Why does accelerated parallel MRI help with susceptibility artefacts?

• Extra credit: PET and data fusion