Towards Free-Breathing Nodal Staging of Upper Abdominal Cancers: MRI-Visible Nodal Size Distributions and Uptake of USPIO Nanoparticles

Motivation: Respiratory motion complicates the detection of abdominal LNs, which are crucial to detect with USPIO-enhanced MRI for nodal staging of upper abdominal cancers. Goal(s): Evaluate if a free-breathing radial stack-of-stars acquisition can match or outperform Cartesian reference scans for the depiction of small abdominal lymph nodes. Approach: Five volunteers with USPIO and 20 patients without USPIO were scanned using radial stack-of-stars, Cartesian dual-echo, and fat-saturated (FS) Cartesian multi-echo sequences for fat/water imaging and clip_image002.gif"> estimation. Results: Radial imaging improved image quality over the Cartesian reference standard, identifying substantially more LNs. Impact: Our method effectively depicts LNs and visualize their USPIO uptake in the upper abdomen. All relevant parameters are obtained from a single free-breathing radial acquisition, yielding higher image quality and more sensitive detection of small lymph nodes.