TwinTree™

s part of the reorganization efforts some of the activities of the Virtual Campus Ini­tia­tive were taken over by TwinTree™.

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Publications and Software

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Cautionary Note – Plagiarism and Infringement of Copyright. Increasingly our publications are copied and used illegally. The Foundation reserves all rights with respect to copyright and trademark ownership of all material at this site and its other printed and digital publications, and will enforce such rights to the full extent of applicable law – even if this means high legal fees and fines for the perpetrator and possibly the end of an academic career.

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EMRF: Fundamentals and Applications to Medical Imaging

plethora of scien­ti­fic pub­li­ca­tions: Teach­ing ma­ter­ial, books of ab­stracts, pro­ceed­ings of con­fe­ren­ces, as well as re­com­men­da­tions for the cli­ni­cal use of MR imag­ing, diction­aries of mag­ne­tic re­son­ance terms, col­lect­ed lect­ures on me­di­cal ethics — and much more — have ap­pear­ed during the last 30 years.

It all started with print­ed lec­ture notes ac­com­pany­ing the early EMRF Work­shops and scien­ti­fic journals issues de­di­cat­ed to the pro­ceed­ings of con­fe­ren­ces.

The standard language of all these publications is English. Most other editions are translations from the English.

However, some books were published in other languages only, e.g., an MR dicti­o­nary and a book sum­ma­riz­ing in­di­ca­tions for MR imag­ing for a German-speak­ing audi­ence.

Magnetic Resonance in Medicine

he textbook Magnetic Resonance in Medicine became the most popular publication. Many thousand copies of this standard textbook were sold worldwide in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. With this book readers should be able to acquire a fundamental knowledge that enables them to pursue studies of their own and to cope with some of the most common problems, such as image contrast and artifacts or questions concerning possible hazards to patients.

The first version of this primer — a little booklet — was written at Paul C. Lau­ter­bur's laboratories in the early 1980s. Lauterbur was the father of MR imaging and received the Nobel Prize twenty years later. The text was intended to be used as the Basic Text­book for EMRF, the European Magnetic Resonance Fo­rum. After Lauterbur saw the first edition, he commented:

"It looks like a fine book, especially for residents, nurses, and technicians."

We worked on it for another twenty years — and finally Lau­ter­bur found the last edition he read before his death "gratifying".

However, the target audience today includes scientists and university professors. They should be able to acquire a basic knowledge which enables them to pursue studies of their own and to cope with some of the most common problems, among them tissue relaxation, image con­trast and artifacts or questions concerning possible hazards to patients – and to become aware of how to perform reliable research, and to ask and be critical. Many organizers of teaching courses and universities the world over found the textbook valuable for their students. Meanwhile it is even a good book to fall back on for professors of radiology — and physics or chemistry.

The sixth edition of the textbook was turned into an e-Learning Textbook: magnetic-resonance.org. More than one year of demanding work resulted in a new website with about 320 pages and several hundred figures and animations.

With far more than one million page views, the e-Learning website continues to be one of the most at­tract­ive online learn­ing plat­forms to study the fun­da­mentals of a scientific discipline. The English and Spanish versions as well as the Chinese beta-version were released to­ge­ther with an updated 11th English version in 2017.

The 12th edition of the textbook was published in print again in 2018, with a corrected 13th edition in 2022. The 14th — e-Learning — edition was published in late 2023, a new Spanish edition will follow.

Electronic Publications

mong the first electronic publications were teaching videos, and slide-based CD-ROMs with chapter-by-chapter teaching courses and clinical MR presentations. The production of video teaching courses was labor-intensiv and time-consuming and the contents became out-dated rapidly; once again "life" teaching courses and books proved their superiority.

The first interactive CD-ROM followed in co­opera­tion with Philips Medical Systems in 2001, containing some synthetic and clinical MR images produced with the soft­ware MR Image Expert.

MR Image Expert: Image and Data Simulation Software

his simulation software was developed into a product in the late 1980s and 1990s by Peter A. Rinck and Geir Torheim. Rinck's group had pre­sent­ed the idea of synthetic MR images and si­mu­lat­ing entire MR exams in the early 1980s at a con­fe­ren­ce in the United States.

More than 12,000 copies of MR Image Expert were made available, many of them as in­ser­tions of the multi­langu­age TRTF-EMRF Text­books. The program simulates MR examinations and can be used for teaching, and image processing in research, e.g., contrast agent studies. While developing the software, it became clear the (even today) sometimes proposed fingerprinting based on multiparametric data collection is unreliable in diagnostic routine. Synthetic images should not be used in clinical examinations to quantify data (e.g., relaxation constants or proton density in tissues).

MR imaging is one of the intellectually most demanding and challenging medical technologies. Understanding the mechanisms that influence and change image contrast in MR imaging, in particular the relations between image contrast and pulse sequences and their parameters, is difficult and often requires much intuition and imagination. While the diagnostic and clinical use of tissue mapping is extremely limited due to its inherent flaws, the method is extremely handy for teaching.

Find more about the scientific background and scientific references of this "quantitative" pro­cess­ing of magnetic resonance data (non-invasive tissue characterization, tissue mapping, or "fin­ger­print­ing") in TRTF's Textbook and in a free offprint on relaxivity.

   The best MRI tea­cher close to cli­ni­cal real­ity is a real-time si­mu­la­tor such as MR Image Expert.

Based on pre­ci­se­ly ac­quir­ed T1 and T2 re­la­xa­tion time and pro­ton den­si­ty values, MR Image Expert creates synthetic magnetic resonance images and can be applied to reliably simulate all steady state pulse sequences. The example to the right shows a meningioma (1.5 Tesla; plain study; no contrast agent application)

Animated simulations created with MR Image Expert are included in the 11th edition of the e-Learning Textbook. Check, for instance, more examples on this web page of the e-Textbook or the latest printed version.

Breach of License Agreement. Because MR Image Expert was plagiarized illegally by a number of companies, the software is not available any more on the open market. We deeply regret this move, but we do not work and invest in free educational material for the benefit of commercial plagiators.

Read more about Publications of TRTF's other Chapters.

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