Application of Time-Fractional Order Bloch Equation in Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting

Abstract: Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) is one novel fast quantitative imaging framework for simultaneous quantification of multiple parameters with pseudo-randomized acquisition patterns. The accuracy of the resulting multi-parameters is very important for clinical applications. In this paper, we derived signal evolutions from the anomalous relaxation using a fractional calculus. More specifically, we utilized time-fractional order extension of the Bloch equations to generate dictionary to provide more complex system descriptions for MRF applications. The representative results of phantom experiments demonstrated the good accuracy performance when applying the time-fractional order Bloch equations to generate dictionary entries in the MRF framework. The utility of the proposed method is also validated by in-vivo study.