Vol 48, No 4 (2017)

Coronary vessel wall magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is important for heart disease diagnosis but often suffers long scan time. Compressed sensing (CS) has been previously used to accelerate MR imaging by reconstructing an MR image from undersampled k-space data using a regularization framework. However, the widely used regularizations in the current CS methods often lead to smoothing effects and thus are unable to reconstruct the coronary vessel walls with sufficient resolution. To address this issue, a novel block-weighted total variation regularization is presented to accelerate the coronary vessel wall MR imaging. The proposed regularization divides the image into two parts: a region-of-interest (ROI) which contains the coronary vessel wall, and the other region with less concerned features. Different penalty weights are given to the two regions. As a result, the small details within ROI do not suffer from over-smoothing while the noise outside the ROI can be significantly suppressed. Results with both numerical simulations and in vivo experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can reconstruct the coronary vessel wall from undersampled k-space data with higher qualities than the conventional CS with the total variation or the edge-preserved total variation.

Single-crystal (100) and (001) TiO₂ rutile substrates have been implanted with 40 keV Fe⁺ at room temperature with high doses in the range of (0.5–1.5) × 10¹⁷ ions/cm². A ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) signal has been observed for all samples with the intensity and the out-of-plane anisotropy increasing with the implantation dose. The FMR signal has been related to the formation of a percolated metal layer consisting of close-packed iron nanoparticles in the implanted region of TiO₂ substrate. Electron spin resonance (ESR) signal of paramagnetic Fe³⁺ ions substituting Ti⁴⁺ positions in the TiO₂ rutile structure has been also observed. The dependences of FMR resonance fields on the DC magnetic field orientation reveal a strong in-plane anisotropy for both (100) and (001) substrate planes. An origin of the in-plane anisotropy of FMR signal is attributed to the textured growth of the iron nanoparticles. As result of the nanoparticle growth aligned with respect to the structure of the rutile host, the in-plane magnetic anisotropy of the samples reflects the symmetry of the crystal structure of the TiO₂ substrates. Crystallographic directions of the preferential growth of iron nanoparticles have been determined by computer modeling of anisotropic ESR signal of substitutional Fe³⁺ ions.

Samples of nitrogen-doped titanium dioxide (anatase, 0.2 ≤ N ≤ 1.0 wt%) prepared by the sol–gel method were investigated using X-band electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, photoconductivity, and photocatalysis measurements. N· and NO· paramagnetic defects in N-TiO₂ have been observed; their concentrations and spin-Hamiltonian parameters were calculated. An increase both in the rate of the generation of free charge carriers and in the rate of photocatalysis was found in N-TiO₂ in contrast with non-doped titania under visible light. The correlation of the density of the observed radicals with the photoconductivity and photocatalysis data is discussed.