PyQMRI: An accelerated Python based Quantitative MRI toolbox

Abstract

Various medical examinations are seeing a shift to a more patient centric and personalized view, based on quantitative instead of qualitative observations and comparisons. This trend has also affected medical imaging, and particularly quantitative MRI (qMRI) gained importance in recent years. qMRI aims to identify the underlying biophysical and tissue parameters that determine contrast in an MR imaging experiment. In addition to contrast information, qMRI permits insights into diseases by providing biophysical, microstructural, and functional information in absolute quantitative values. For quantification, biophysical models are used, which describe the relationship between image intensity and physical properties of the tissue for certain scanning sequences and sequence parameters. By performing several measurements with different sequence parameters (e.g. flip angle, repetition time, echo time) the related inverse problem of identifying the tissue parameters sought can be solved.