The principal aim of this work is to test the viability of Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) measurements in human myocardium, an experiment which has seen promising attempts in recent literature. A central challenge to the ~uccess of these experiments has been in the limited scale of the measured effect; this work therefore includes efforts to separate the BOLD effect from noise and confounding signals. BOLD is then measured by intensity in MR images produced using Steady State Free Precession (SSFP) acquisition, weighted by a T2 preparation module to introduce the target contrast. Two modelling sections are included: first, the changes in physiology which influence the signal intensity in the MR images via the T2 dependence; and secondly the factors upon which the preparation depends, which are not entirely limited to the T2 of the tissue. These models are investigated with the aim of increasing the BOLD contrast and removing any other dependencies. An empirical model is shown to be suitable for the relationship between oxygenation and T2, and improvements are suggested and explained by thorough simulation ofthe preparation module. Compensation for a further confounding effect is also investigated: that of the increase in heart rate which accompanies the adenosine infusion used in the BOLD experiment protocol to reveal differences in the response of ischaemic and healthy tissue. The compensation is shown to reduce temporal variance in SI measurements, and to increase the separation between distributions of SI in tissue classes. A process of registration and segmentation is refined for sampling BOLD information from the SS FP images, and tested to show a low failure rate. Finally, the BOLD process is then tested in a set of human subjects including healthy volunteers and patients with coronary artery disease, investigating the consequent difference in tissue oxygenation. A significant difference is shown in the responses to stress of BOLD SI three tissue classes in these subjects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:589620 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Howells, Ruairidh |
| Contributors | Robson, Matthew |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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