Congratulations to Dr Sam Keaveney (NCITA MRI Physicist, Royal Marsden Hospital & ICR), Dr Julia Markus (NCITA Senior Research Radiographer, UCL), Dr Simon Doran (NCITA Repository Unit manager, ICR), Professor Dow-Mu Koh (NCITA Governance Group member, ICR & RMH) and Professor Christina Messiou (NCITA coinvestigator, ICR & RMH) on their recent paper ‘A scan-specific quality control acquisition for clinical whole-body (WB) MRI protocols’ published online in Physics in Medicine & Biology on 22 April 2024.
The objective of the study was to address the challenge of degraded image quality in whole body (WB)-MRI due to faulty radiofrequency (RF) coil elements or mispositioning of the coil arrays. Phantom-based quality control (QC) methods are limited by scanner and staff availability. Therefore, the team have developed a scan-specific QC acquisition and processing pipeline, which was sufficiently rapid to be added to the clinical WB-MRI protocol to quickly detect broken RF coil elements, thereby enhancing the quality of WB-MRI by reducing the number of patient examinations conducted with suboptimal equipment.
RF coil elements were flagged as potentially broken on five occasions, with faults confirmed in four of those cases. The method was shown to have a precision of 80 % and a recall of 100 % showing its reliability for detecting faulty RF coil elements. The coil array positioning measurements were consistent across scanners underscoring its potential to improve image quality across multicentre studies.