Motion-robust magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MR-MRF) for quantitative liver cancer imaging

作者：Chenyang Liu, Tian Li, Lu Wang, Yat-Lam Wong, Mandi Wang, Huiqin ZHANG, Zuojun Wang, Haonan Xiao, Shaohua Zhi, Wen Li, Jiang Zhang, Xinzhi Teng, Victor Lee, Peng Cao, Jing Cai · 发表于：Physics in Medicine and Biology · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1088/1361-6560/ae3b03 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：MRI in cancer diagnosis、Hepatocellular Carcinoma Treatment and Prognosis、Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications

Abstract Objective. This study aims to develop a motion-robust magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MR-MRF) technique for liver cancer imaging to eliminate the need for breath-hold scanning. Approach. To mitigate respiratory motion artifacts in free-breathing abdominal MRF, the MR-MRF technique comprising two core components. First, respiratory motion is modeled by applying an isotropic total variation (TV)-regularized registration algorithm between a target end-of-exhalation (EOE) phase and three motion phases. Second, motion-resolved tissue property maps are reconstructed using a low-rank TV optimization framework, which incorporates the estimated inter-phase motion to align all acquired MRF dynamics to the EOE phase. MR-MRF is evaluated by 22 patients (mean age, 62 years ± 10 [SD]; 15 males and 7 females) with hepatocellular carcinoma. Radiologist’s blinded assessment and organ boundary sharpness measurements are performed to evaluate the image quality of MR-MRF-derived tissue maps. The test-retest tissue quantification repeatability is assessed by two consecutive MRF scans with distinct breathing patterns. Paired Student’s t -test is used for statistical significance analysis with a p -value threshold of 0.05. Main results. MR-MRF achieved successful reconstruction of motion-resolved tissue maps at EOE phase, with blinded radiologist assessment yielding an average score of 3 (moderate quality—sufficient for diagnosis) for overall image impression. The FWHM of organ boundari...