Simultaneous Bilateral Knee MR Imaging
Osteoarthritis (OA) remains a tremendous burden to society, affecting the majority of the population by age 65. OA is commonly a bilateral disease. While long scan time and costs have precluded separate scanning of both knees in clinical MRI, there is evidence that bilateral examinations are beneficial for evaluation of OA changes, especially for longitudinal studies. In this work, we develop a bilateral coil-array setup to scan both knees simultaneously with similar scan time and image quality compared to single knee acquisitions. Further, this method was also able to maintain quantitative accuracy for bilateral knee scans which is vital for detection of early disease changes. Simultaneous imaging of both knees can improve the value of MRI knee evaluations; providing an internal control for clinical evaluation of pathology as well as helping reduce costs and improve continuity in research studies.
Kogan F, Levine E, Chaudhari AS, Monu UD, Epperson K, Oei EHG, Gold GE, Hargreaves BA. Simultaneous bilateral-knee MR imaging. Magn Reson Med. 2018 Aug;80(2):529-37.
[a] Dual Coil-Array setup with two 16-channel flexible phased-array coils and [b] Sample field-of-view for bilateral knee imaging. This allows 2D and 3D acquisitions of both knees with similar [c,d] scan time, image quality and Single-to-Noise (SNR) compared with single knee acquisitions, while maintaining [e,f] quantitative accuracy.
Evan Levine and Uche Monu are alumni of the BMR group