Wendy Harris, MedPhys PhD student (advisors: Lei Ren, PhD and Fang-Fang Yin, PhD) received the 2016 ISMRM Merit Award for her work in developing a novel technique to generate ultra-fast high-quality volumetric cine MRI (VC-MRI) using patient prior information. The VC-MRI was generated by deforming the prior volumetric MRI images based on ultra-fast on-board 2D-cine MRI and patient PCA-based respiratory breathing model. The ultra-fast 2D-cine images were acquired by sampling about 10% of k-space. The undersampled cine images were reconstructed using an iterative MR reconstruction algorithm with a total generalized variation penalty. The technique was evaluated using both anthropomorphic digital phantom and patient data. Results demonstrated the feasibility of generating ultrafast-VC-MRI for both inter-and intra-fraction verification of moving targets in radiotherapy.
