Introduction
Radiologic exams including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for pediatric patients require utmost attention to safety and efficacy. While it is now known that an MR exam itself is non-invasive and generally poses minimal risk to infants and children, acquiring diagnostically appropriate images remain difficult in the routine clinical settings due to several factors. Apart from potential side effects of contrast medium and sedatives, the lack of or difficulty in getting cooperation from pediatric patients frequently lead to prolonged exam times and retakes due to image quality degradation. Furthermore, pediatric neuroimaging requires careful attention and optimization to image acquisition parameters since imaging protocols developed for adult patients may be suboptimal due to the difference in structural size, myelination, and sulcation. In this sense, exam time reduction by means of optimized accelerated acquisition has greater implications for pediatric patients compared to adult population.
SwiftMR™ is a FDA 510(k)-cleared* deep learning (DL)-based software medical device developed by AIRS Medical. SwiftMR™ is capable of reducing image noise and increasing spatial resolution of MR images owing to its vast training dataset of high-quality MR images. This enables quality improvement of MR images coming from accelerated acquisition times, alleviating potential limitation in diagnosis from otherwise low-quality images. Furthermore, reducing scan times also contributes to decreasing pediatric patient discomfort, reducing the amount of potential sedation and retakes due to motion.
The following clinical cases were collected from a research collaboration with Seoul National University Hospital (Seoul, Korea). This prospective study was approved by the institutional review board (IRB) and informed consents were received from all enrolled subjects (or their parent or guardian) who required MRI exams due to brain neoplasms or follow-up exams after treatment. The purpose of this study was to clinically compare the quality of pediatric brain MR images acquired at institutional conventional protocol and accelerated protocol reconstructed with SwiftMR™.
* FDA 510(k)-cleared for Standard of Care (SOC) and reduced scan time MR images for all body parts. Supported field strength may vary by country.