Jingjia Chen, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and scientist with the Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research at NYU Langone Health, was awarded second prize in the scientific oral presentations competition at the body MRI workshop held by the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) on March 28-30 at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Dr. Chen’s talk described a novel approach for diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of the prostate that delivers images free from common distortions.
DWI is a type of MRI used at virtually every stage of prostate cancer care: from detection to active surveillance, staging, treatment, and monitoring for signs of potential recurrence. However, imaging the prostate—a small organ tucked under the bladder, pressed against the rectum, and wrapped around the urethra—poses challenges to MRI, which doesn’t work well near air-filled structures or places crowded by tissues with disparate magnetic properties. This affects prostate DWI by causing distortions, artifacts, and limiting image resolution—all of which can make accurate diagnosis harder.
The new approach, developed by Dr. Chen and colleagues at NYU Langone with coauthors at Siemens and Indiana University School of Medicine, centers on a technique called turbo spin echo MRI, which is more robust to air-tissue interfaces but has some shortcomings, such as blurring and noise. The researchers address these limitations by integrating and adapting several advanced image acquisition, reconstruction, and denoising techniques.
The resulting method, called TGSE-PROPELLER-DWI with golden-angle rotation, achieves distortion-free DWI of the prostate even when the standard clinical MRI fails, while also allowing for higher resolution and shorter scans. Dr. Chen and coauthors write in their abstract that the advance offers “a promising alternative for patients.”
Last year, research led by Dr. Chen in dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI of the liver won second-place in the scientific poster competition at the ISMRM workshop on MRI motion correction in Quebec City.
Other presentations from NYU Langone’s team at last weekend’s body MRI workshop in Philadelphia included a talk on cardiac gating, flow compensation, and fitting effects in renal imaging by Nima Gilani, PhD; a talk on whole-body imaging and cancer management by Stella Kang, MD; and a power pitch on deep learning based DCE-MRI reconstruction by Haoyang Pei, MSc. Full program is available on the workshop website.
A version of this post first appeared on the CAI2R LinkedIn.
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Jingjia Chen, postdoctoral fellow who investigates longitudinal imaging and imaging in the presence of motion, talks about using the past in the present, improving body MRI, and taking better pictures.
Congratulations to Jingjia Chen and coauthors on winning second prize in the scientific poster competition at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine workshop on motion correction.