Radiation Protection Dosimetry Advance Access originally published online on February 7, 2006
Radiation Protection Dosimetry 2005 117(1-3):74-78; doi:10.1093/rpd/nci731
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Interventional magnetic resonance imaging: an alternative to image guidance with ionising radiation
1 Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (dkfz), Abt. Medizinische Physik in der Radiologie (E020), Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
2 Siemens Medical Solutions, Karl-Schall-Strasse 6, 91052 Erlangen, Germany
* Corresponding author: M.Bock{at}dkfz.de
At present, interventional procedures, such as stent placement, are performed under X-ray image guidance. Unfortunately with X-ray imaging, both patient and interventionalist are exposed to ionising radiation. Furthermore, X-ray imaging is lacking soft tissue contrast and is not capable of true 3-D displays of either interventional device or tissue morphology. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers excellent soft tissue contrast, 3-D acquisition techniques, as well as rapid image acquisition and reconstruction. Despite these advantages, MR-guided interventions are challenging owing to the limited access to the patient, strong magnetic and radio-frequency fields that require special interventional devices, inferior image frame rates and spatial resolution, and high MRI scanner noise. For MR-guided intravascular interventions, where access to the target organ is achieved through catheters, dedicated hardware and automated image slice positioning techniques have been developed. We illustrate that MR-guided renal embolisations can be performed in closed-bore high-field MR scanners.