Dr Fangrong Zong - Challenges of diffusion kurtosis imaging in clinical applications

Recently developed diffusion magnetic resonance imaging techniques enable better characterizing of tissue microstructure even though it is usually accompanied by cost increments in hardware and software. Among these techniques, diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) has become a unique protocol for quantifying non-Gaussian diffusion in tissues on the basis of a high-order cumulant expansion mathematical model. Thus, its data acquisition is sophisticated and the resolution of the kurtosis image is comparably low, which hinders its spread in clinical practice. This talk will cover relevant technical challenges and our solutions of DKI towards two clinical applications. A threshold-isocontouring were firstly proposed to analyze DKI data acquired from female human breasts with minimal interobserver variability. We further implemented the DKI techniques at ultra-high magnetic field scanner to improve the image quality and resolution of human brain. To make it closer towards clinical acceptance, we speed up the acquisition by randomly undersampling the k-space data. With a specially designed image reconstruction algorithm, it is feasible to recover the unsampled kurtosis metrics with high accuracy.

Bio: Fangrong graduated from Victoria University of Wellington (Wellington, NZ) as a Doctor of Philosophy in MR physics, during which she did an internship in the German Cancer Research Centre (Heidelberg, GE). She then moved to Queensland Brain Institute (Brisbane, AU) for as a postdoctoral fellowship to develop multi-modal MRI techniques in pre-clinical and clinical applications. 

Fangrong is an associate research fellow in the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research involves developing novel diffusion MRI methods and relevant inversion algorithms to obtain tissue microstructure and morphometry. She is currently working on time-efficient data acquisition and image reconstruction of DKI to clinical applications. Fangrong’s research also focuses on ultra-high field techniques and now she is the assistant director of the whole-body 9.4T metabolic imaging center.