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Zhuang Liu

DPhil student

My DPhil research is a joint project supervised by Prof Damian Tyler, Prof Ladislav Valkovič, and Dr James Grist. It focuses on metabolic cardiac MRI and MRS and consists of two parts: [2-13C] pyruvate hyperpolarisation and the 31P concentric ring pulse sequence migration between devices from different vendors.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy (MRI/MRS) has been used clinically to assess cardiac structure and function. However, their applications have been restricted by challenges such as low sensitivity, long scanning duration, and cardiac and respiratory motion.

Thanks to the hyperpolarised magnetic resonance technique, which improves the signal strength of MRI by a factor of more than 10,000, it enables real-time imaging of cardiac metabolism at a deeper level. [2-13C] Pyruvate hyperpolarisation is ideal for assessing TCA cycle flux, which has clinical potential in chronic mitochondrial dysfunction like cardiomyopathies. I aim to optimise the formulation of the [2-13C] pyruvate to boost its performance during metabolic MR imaging.

For the 31P project, the group recently developed a novel concentric ring pulse sequence for cardiac phosphorus MRS at 7T, which significantly improved the image quality compared to the traditional phase-encoded chemical shifting imaging (CSI) within the same run time, or a much shorter duration of the scan for a similar image quality. To further validate the robustness and the generalizability of the pulse sequence, it is essential to bring it across different devices from different vendors, which forms the other part of my DPhil research.