Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Magn Reson Med. 2024 Jul;92(1):246-256. doi: 10.1002/mrm.30062. Epub 2024 Mar 12.
To reduce the inter-scanner variability of diffusion MRI (dMRI) measures between scanners from different vendors by developing a vendor-neutral dMRI pulse sequence using the open-source vendor-agnostic Pulseq platform.
We implemented a standard EPI based dMRI sequence in Pulseq. We tested it on two clinical scanners from different vendors (Siemens Prisma and GE Premier), systematically evaluating and comparing the within- and inter-scanner variability across the vendors, using both the vendor-provided and Pulseq dMRI sequences. Assessments covered both a diffusion phantom and three human subjects, using standard error (SE) and Lin's concordance correlation to measure the repeatability and reproducibility of standard DTI metrics including fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD).
Identical dMRI sequences were executed on both scanners using Pulseq. On the phantom, the Pulseq sequence showed more than a 2.5× reduction in SE (variability) across Siemens and GE scanners. Furthermore, Pulseq sequences exhibited markedly reduced SE in-vivo, maintaining scan-rescan repeatability while delivering lower variability in FA and MD (more than 50% reduction in cortical/subcortical regions) compared to vendor-provided sequences.
The Pulseq diffusion sequence reduces the cross-scanner variability for both phantom and in-vivo data, which will benefit multi-center neuroimaging studies and improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging studies.
通过使用开源的与厂商无关的 Pulseq 平台开发厂商中立的扩散磁共振成像（dMRI）脉冲序列，减少来自不同厂商的扫描仪之间 dMRI 测量的扫描仪间可变性。
我们在 Pulseq 中实现了一个基于标准 EPI 的 dMRI 序列。我们在两台来自不同厂商（西门子 Prisma 和 GE Premier）的临床扫描仪上对其进行了测试，使用供应商提供的和 Pulseq dMRI 序列，系统地评估和比较了供应商之间的内部和扫描仪间的可变性。评估涵盖了一个扩散体模和三个人体受试者，使用标准误差（SE）和 Lin 的一致性相关来测量包括分数各向异性（FA）和平均扩散度（MD）在内的标准 DTI 指标的可重复性和再现性。
使用 Pulseq 在两台扫描仪上执行了相同的 dMRI 序列。在体模上，与西门子和 GE 扫描仪相比，Pulseq 序列的 SE（可变性）降低了 2.5 倍以上。此外，与供应商提供的序列相比，Pulseq 序列在体内表现出明显降低的 SE，在保持扫描-扫描可重复性的同时，FA 和 MD 的可变性降低（皮质/皮质下区域降低超过 50%）。
Pulseq 扩散序列减少了体模和体内数据的跨扫描仪可变性，这将有利于多中心神经影像学研究，并提高神经影像学研究的再现性。
