A Study On Quality Assurance Of Brain Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Functional MRI(fMRI) is a powerful tool for brain science and a revolutionary breakthrough for neuroscience research technology. It make people view the activity of human brain without any trauma. So it is one of the most important developments of science in 90' of last century. The technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging is rapidly moving from one of technical interest to wide clinical application. However, there are a number of questions regarding theese method. The signal of fMRI is so small and it's process is so complex that various disturbance will pollute the real signal. It needs profound understanding and effective control to minimize the noise, to make sure that the data is reliable and the result is correct. So, quality assurance of fMRI's machine and process is very necessary. Here, we first introduce the basic principle of magnetic resonance imaging and functional brain imaging. Then we discuss the problem of quality assurance from a few points of view such as site design, scanner performance, experiment design, subject preparation and monitoring, acquisition of images, statistical method, etc.Stability is an important problem during functional scanning. We propose a simple method to value the stability of a MR machine. And we successfully use the method of ROC to select the best scanning parameter such as scanning matrix and echo time. We also use the ROC method to tell which data processing procedure is better to functional brain imaging. To perfusion imaging based on arterial spin labeling, we designed a phantom to mimic the moving of blood proton.These researches will dedicate to check a new MR machine and instruct the physiatrist in hospitals to carry out the research of functional magnetic resonance imaging.