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Home Industry News Super-fast MRI technique promises new insight into laryngeal functions

Super-fast MRI technique promises new insight into laryngeal functions

24th April 2015

A team from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology have been able to gain new insight into the way the larynx works using a new super-fast technique for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The facility's Biomedical Imaging Center (BIC) has designed a specialised acquisition method that gathers the necessary MRI data for both space and time in two parts, before combining them to achieve high-quality, high-spatial resolution and high-speed imaging.

As such, this new technique – detailed in the journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine – can scan 100 frames per second, as opposed to the maximum of ten or so that is typical with previous systems.

This has allows the team to view in the detail the approximately 100 muscles in the chest, neck, jaw, tongue and lips that work together to allow the neuromuscular system and larynx to produce sounds such as speech and singing.

It will help them to gain new insights into how these processes change and atrophy over time, potentially opening the door to new methods of arresting and reversing this degeneration.

Brad Sutton, technical director of the BIC and associate professor in bioengineering at Illinois, said: "The technique excels at high spatial and temporal resolution of speech – it's both very detailed and very fast. Often you can have only one these in MR imaging."ADNFCR-8000103-ID-801785043-ADNFCR

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