New DFG grant
We are very excited to announce that our lab just received funding from DFG for a new 3-year research project. The goal of this joint project with the Department of Radiology (Armin Nagel and Rafael Heiß) it to develop an approach for MR imaging of orthopedic implants with reduced metal artifacts at 0.55T (Siemens Healthineers Free.Max). While this lower field strength offers advantages in terms of reduced metal artifacts (see the example figure of comparison measurements of knee and spine implants at 0.55T and 1.5T), this advantage comes at the cost of reduced SNR, long scan-times and challenges for fat suppression.
We will address these three issues with sparse sampling to bring the scan duration to a clinically feasible time of 4 minutes, machine learning for image reconstruction and subject-specific spectral-spatial fat-suppression pulses. Together with the reduced metal artifacts due to the lower field strength, our goal is to reach unprecedented MR image quality near orthopedic implants.
