Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/R88489/01
Title:	Angiography and magnetic field mapping of the brain using phase-contrast MRI and robust 3-D phase unwrapping
Principal Investigator:	Huntley, Professor JM
Other Investigators:	Schwarzbauer, Professor C Cusack, Dr R
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Cambridge University Hospitals Trust Lulea University of Technology University of Cambridge University of Tokyo
Department:	Mechanical Engineering
Organisation:	Loughborough University
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	18 November 2002	Ends:	17 May 2005	Value (£):	215,925
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Biomedical neuroscience
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Healthcare
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a primary tool for clinians and neuroscince researchers. It now alloes the mapping of blood flow ( magnetic resonance angiography, MRA) and magnetic fields, both of which have great potential in neuroscience and clinical applications. Measuring flow and field both require unwrapping of the 3 dimensional pase maps encoding them. Existing unwrapping algorithms are insuffiencently robust to cope with the noise-induced phase singularities, which are very common in magnetic field maps and MRA. It is proposed to apply, and further develop, two noise-immune 3 dimensional phase unwrapping algorithms, developed recently for use in the analysis of optical speckle pattern intermeromtetry data. The first method guarantees independence of the unwrapped phase map on unwrapping path, and the second, so-called sub-nyquist temporal unwrapping, will use an optimised sequence of echo times or velocity-encoding field gradientsa to maximise singal-to-noise ratio for a given acquisition duration. The former method will also be applied to the analysis of 3-D X-ray interferograms for computed tomography (CT), which is a promising new technology for imaging refractive index distributions within biological soft tissues. Acquisition and processing strategies will be optimised for each new applicatopn by evaluating acquistion and image quality at each level in the processing pipeline.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.lboro.ac.uk