Week 3

This week we had an interesting experience of MR scanning. Me, Greg, Chris and Lina gathered at Weill Cornell MR Facility at E 55th Street around Sunday evening. This field trip inside real MR scanner site was inspiringly fun, even we had already learned some MR basics on Dr. Adie's class. The MR scanner, which could only be reached at hospital for clinical use, was utilized as a tool to understand what was happening from patient being sent into the magnet to the images popping up to the screen. It was pretty interesting, both for the subject or person in front of the console, to look at what it looked like inside one's own body part, or someone else's. Besides, we also realized that different MR protocols could give different contrast between various tissue, by which means we are able to differentiate disease site from health tissue on a multi-modality base.

Besides the time at the scanner, I continued following Dr. Prince reading cases in the MR body reading room. There was a specific case in which I realized how to generate fat quantification from MR image series. In MR imaging, signals from water and fat have different frequencies. In terms of image intensity, the water and fat may shown as hyper-intensity (in-phase) when two signals are aligned in the same direction, or hypo-intensity (out-of-phase) when they are in opposite directions. By comparing the intensity of in-phase and out-of-phase images we could calculate the fat/water ratio in the imaged organ (e.g. the liver)