Magnetic resonance microwave absorption imaging: Feasibility of signal detection

Purpose: Magnetic resonance (MR) technique was used to detect small displacements induced by localized absorption of pulsed 434 MHz microwave power as a potential method for tumor detection. Methods: Phase contrast subtraction was used to separate the phase change due to motion from thermoelastic expansion from other contributions to phase variation such as the bulk temperature rise of the medium and phase offsets from the MR scanner itself. A simple set of experiments was performed where the motion was constrained to be one dimensional which provided controls on the data acquisition and motion extraction procedures. Specifically, the MR-detected motion signal was isolated by altering the direction of the microwave-induced motion and sampling the response with motion encoding gradients in all three directions when the microwave power was turned on and turned off. Results: Successful signal detection, as evidenced by the recording of a systematic alternating (zigzag) phase pattern, occurred only when the motion encoding was in parallel with either the vertical or horizontal direction of the microwave-induced motion on both 10 and 4 mm spatial scales. Conclusions: These results demonstrate, for the first time, that motion associated with thermoelastic expansion from the absorption of pulsed microwave power can be detected with MR. (C) 2009 American Association of Physicists in Medicine. [DOI: 10.1118/1.3215533]