The present disclosure provides methods and systems for high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), including real-time high-resolution functional MRI methods and systems.

In a method for controlling a magnetic resonance imaging system as part of functional magnetic resonance imaging, a main magnetic field B0 is provided having a field strength of at most 1.4 tesla at a main field magnet system (4) of the magnetic resonance imaging system (1); and a measurement is performed as part of functional magnetic resonance imaging, wherein a measurement sequence (MS) is applied that has a longer echo time TE (e.g. longer than 100 ms).

A method for creating a dictionary for a magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) reconstruction includes training a semi-supervised learning system based on at least a set of MRF data and a set of control variables and generating a plurality of signal evolutions using the trained semi-supervised learning system. The method also includes generating an MRF dictionary using the plurality of signal evolutions generated using the trained semi-supervised learning system and storing the MRF dictionary in a memory. In one embodiment, the semi-supervised learning system is a MRF generative adversarial network (GAN).

A low-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. The system includes a plurality of magnetics components comprising at least one first magnetics component configured to produce a low-field main magnetic field B.sub.0 and at least one second magnetics component configured to acquire magnetic resonance data when operated, and at least one controller configured to operate one or more of the plurality of magnetics components in accordance with at least one low-field zero echo time (LF-ZTE) pulse sequence.

In one embodiment, a magnetic resonance imaging apparatus includes memory circuitry configured to store a predetermined program; and processing circuitry configured, by executing the predetermined program, to set an FSE type pulse sequence in which an excitation pulse is followed by a plurality of refocusing pulses, the plurality of the refocusing being divided into at least a first pulse group subsequent to the excitation pulse and a second pulse group subsequent to the first pulse group, the first pulse group including refocusing pulses having a predetermined high flip angle, and the second pulse group including refocusing pulses having flip angles decreased from the predetermined high flip angle toward a flip angle of zero, and generate an image of an object from respective MR signals corresponding to the plurality of refocusing pulses acquired by applying the fast spin echo type pulse sequence to the object.

In a method for determining magnetic resonance (MR) parameters, an MR fingerprint of a voxel is acquired by execution of a pulse sequence, the MR fingerprint is provided as an input into the input layer of a trained neural network, and at least one MR parameter relating to the MR fingerprint is provided at the output layer of the neural network.

A system and method for optimized diffusion-weighted imaging is provided. In one aspect, the method includes providing a plurality of constraints for imaging a target at a selected diffusion weighting, and applying an optimization framework to generate an optimized diffusion encoding gradient waveform satisfying the plurality of constraints. The method also includes performing, using the MRI system, a pulse sequence comprising the optimized diffusion encoding gradient waveform to generate diffusion-weighted data, and generating at least one image of the target using the diffusion-weighted data.

A magnetic resonance imaging method according to an embodiment includes performing a balanced SSFP sequence, repeatedly applies an excitation RF pulse to a subject at intervals of a repetition time and applies gradient magnetic field pulses balanced such that a time integral becomes zero within each interval of the repetition time, while further applying a spin labeling gradient magnetic field for generating one or more continuous spin labels within each interval of the repetition time.

The present disclosure provides methods and systems for high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), including real-time high-resolution functional MRI methods and systems.

In a method and magnetic resonance apparatus for recording magnetic resonance data using a bSSFP sequence, a k-space line to be scanned in k-space is divided into at least two line sections, with at least two of the at least two line sections being scanned separately in different repetitions of the sequence.