Introduction: MR imaging at ultra-high field strengths has given encouraging results for high resolution functional and diffusion-weighted brain image acquisition. For both applications, single-shot echo-planar imaging (EPI) is often used, because it acquires entire slices in a fraction of a second and thus avoids distributed artifacts associated with head motion. However, EPI acquisitions are ...

The presence of resonance frequency offsets often causes artifacts in images acquired with true fast imaging with steady-state precession (true-FISP). One source of resonance offsets is a suboptimal setting of the synthesizer frequency. The goal of this work was to demonstrate that shifting the synthesizer frequency could minimize the off-resonance related image artifacts in true-FISP. A simple...

Introduction: Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCEMRI) is widely used in clinical abdominal and pelvic MRI for tissue characterization and visualization of focal lesions. The technique affords adequate spatial resolution but temporal resolution is often insufficient for visualizing hypervascular tumors such as neuro-endocrine metastases and hepato-cellular carcinoma (HCC). Optimal timing of contr...

Background Stimulated-echo acquisition mode (STEAM) is one of the key pulse sequences in CMR imaging, as it alleviates rapid magnetization decay with T2 relaxation. Fat suppression is frequently implemented in cardiac imaging to improve visualization and tissue characterization, albeit at the cost of reduced temporal resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), as well as possible increase of sp...

Purpose: MR Coronary Artery Imaging (CAI) remains challenging due to the need for high spatial resolution as well as due to constraints imposed by physiological motion and the stringent requirements for fat and muscle suppression to visualize the arterial signal with good contrast. 3D ECG gated balanced steady state free precession (SSFP) imaging has shown great promise due to its high SNR, exc...

Most diffusion imaging sequences rely on single-shot echo-planar imaging (EPI) for spatial encoding since it is the fastest acquisition available. However, it is sensitive to chemical-shift artifacts due to the low bandwidth in the phase-encoding direction, making fat suppression necessary. Often, spectral-selective RF pulses followed by gradient spoiling are used to selectively saturate the fa...

BACKGROUND Platelet hyperreactivity is a factor which contributes towards increased risk of cardiovascular events in adults with type 2 diabetes (T2DM). However, little is known about platelets' disturbances among children with type 1 diabetes (T1DM). The aim of the study was to investigate whether platelets' morphology or function are altered in children with type 1 diabetes, potentially predi...

Obesity increases severity of acute pancreatitis (AP) by unclear mechanisms. We investigated the effect of the PPAR-gamma agonist rosiglitazone (RGZ, 0.01% in the diet) on severity of AP induced by administration of IL-12+ IL-18 in male C57BL6 mice fed a low fat (LFD) or high fat diet (HFD), under the hypothesis that RGZ would reduce disease severity in HFD-fed obese animals. In both LFD and HF...

Background: Pre-eclampsia is a complex disease process originating at the maternal- fetal interface that affects multiple organ systems. The exact pathophysiology of preeclampsia not known but it considered to be associated with endothelial cell dysfunction, increased inflammatory responses and hypercoagulability. receptors located on platelets are activated in pre-eclampsia by several protease...

Subjective measures of awareness rest on the assumption that conscious knowledge is knowledge that participants know they possess. Post-Decision Wagering (PDW), recently proposed as a new measure of awareness, requires participants to place a high or a low wager on their decisions. Whereas advantageous wagering indicates awareness of the knowledge on which the decisions are based, cases in whic...