US 12,136,217 B2
Magnetic-resonance-based method for measuring microscopic histologic soft tissue textures
Timothy W. James, Santa Barbara, CA (US); and Kristin James, Santa Barbara, CA (US)
Assigned to BIOPROTONICS, INC., Santa Barbara, CA (US)
Filed by BIOPROTONICS, INC., Santa Barbara, CA (US)
Filed on Jan. 17, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/577,098.
Claims priority of provisional application 63/138,660, filed on Jan. 18, 2021.
Prior Publication US 2022/0230315 A1, Jul. 21, 2022
Int. Cl. G06T 7/00 (2017.01); A61B 5/00 (2006.01); A61B 5/055 (2006.01); G01R 33/54 (2006.01); G01R 33/56 (2006.01)
CPC G06T 7/0014 (2013.01) [A61B 5/055 (2013.01); A61B 5/7257 (2013.01); G01R 33/543 (2013.01); G01R 33/5608 (2013.01); G06T 2207/10088 (2013.01); G06T 2207/30081 (2013.01)] 9 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method for measuring soft tissue texture to identify diseased as opposed to normal tissue, the method comprising:
identifying textural markers in a ground truth that distinguish diseased tissue from normal tissue;
selecting a MRμT excitation sequence comprising a Multiple TR series and associated parameters to reveal said markers;
acquiring data in an MR scanner responsive to the selected MRμT excitation sequence to establish a multipoint time series data set by performing a selective internal excitation of a Volume of Interest (VOI) within a targeted tissue region;
imposing a spatial-frequency phase encode for a targeted tissue textural-wavelength, λ (or k-value), of interest along a texture analysis direction within the VOI; and
recording a resulting signal; and
analyzing the acquired data for presence of said markers by
performing a FFT on the multipoint time series data set acquired to generate an NMR spectrum of signal intensity vs. PPM chemical shift with a system center frequency as 0 PPM;
identifying a center frequency of the NMR spectrum from a selected TR measurement of the Multiple TR series of excitations of the targeted VOI by plotting and locating the maximum of the NMR signal vs. chemical shift;
selecting a span in chemical shift and summing the signal over the span to generate a magnitude measurement as a raw signal for each wavelength encode and for the k0 encoded TR;
selecting the span and summing the signal from an ultimate TR to generate a measure of noise level (noise);
calculating the signal for each of the encoded wavelength TR increments as
signal(λ)=(raw signal(λ)-noise)/(raw signal(∞)-noise); and
binning the multiple measurements of the signal to highlight distribution of feature sizes.