Interventional MR-imaging for thermal ablation therapy

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has several unique advantages for guiding thermal ablation therapies. It not only provides excellent soft-tissue contrast and multiplanar capabilities, but also is sensitive to thermal effects. To make full use of these advantages for thermal ablation procedures, we present an integrated solution for a thermal therapy workflow that combines dedicated MRI pulse sequences and visualization/analysis tools for trajectory planning, automatic slice positioning for image-guided needle placement, and advanced MR thermal mapping. The paper highlights a novel approach to detect the needle in real-time MR images and to automatically realign the scan planes. In addition, a global approach to correct for B₀ field shift during online MR thermometry is introduced. The application has been implemented using the open-source eXtensible Imaging Platform (XIP).