Abstract:

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a premier clinical imaging modality since its invention in the 70s. Novel engineering technologies and clinical applications continue to emerge in the field. In this talk, I will introduce basic MRI principles and highlight several exciting new developments in MRI: high-speed imaging, cellular and molecular MRI, and hyperpolarized MRI. Translating technical advance into more affordable and powerful clinical imaging tools poses many challenges and opportunities. I will review some of our work at Texas A&M on advanced MRI, in particular, fast imaging with transmit/receive arrays and constrained reconstruction.

Bio:

Ji received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. degree from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), all in Electrical Engineering. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research interests include high-speed imaging in MRI, biomedical image processing and their applications in cancer and cardiac applications. His recent work is focused on MRI with large arrays and compressive sensing MRI.

Ji received the Zhongwang Outstanding Graduate Student Prize from Tsinghua University in 1997, the Sundaram Seshu Fellowship from UIUC in 2001, and the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2008. He serves regularly as an ad-hoc member on NIH and NSF grant review panels, and associate editors of IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine and Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery. He is senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).