Dissertation Talk: Near-Silent Dynamic and Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Event details Date: Thursday, August 13, 2026 Time: 3:00 PM to 3:00 PM Location: 490 Cory Hall (Swarm Lab, Immersion Room) Type: Lecture / Workshop Audience: Faculty,Students About this event Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an essential diagnostic tool that relies on sustained patient cooperation through long and extremely loud exams. Although techniques for quiet MRI do exist, they are restrictive in either speed or contrast mechanism. In this talk, I will present contributions that enable near-silent MRI to be flexible, capture rapid dynamics, and be sensitive to contrast agent uptake, thereby demonstrating both dynamic and contrast-enhanced applications. Specifically, these contributions address the challenges of zero echo time (ZTE) imaging, a technique for efficient and near-silent 3D MRI that is generally limited to static, non-contrast applications. First, I will introduce a joint acquisition-reconstruction framework that enables contrast-enhanced ZTE without compromising on its scan efficiency. This reconstruction implicitly recovers the low-spatial-frequency information that is missing in ZTE by leveraging the spatial encoding from multi-coil receiver arrays. To address the memory requirements of this large-scale 3D reconstruction, I will then introduce a compact learned representation of the receiver coil sensitivity maps to reduce their memory footprint. Next, I will present a strategy to enable flexible dynamic ZTE at high spatiotemporal resolutions by sampling the spatial-frequency domain incoherently over time, while satisfying the constraints of ZTE to maintain low acoustic noise. Finally, I will combine these advances with a tailored acquisition module for contrast agent sensitivity to demonstrate dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI that is near-silent. Official event details: https://events.berkeley.edu/eecs/event/325288-dissertation-talk-near-silent-dynamic-and