Magnetic resonance thermography in pelvis

Three methods of magnetic resonance thermography previously developed for monitoring hyperthermia treatments in pelvis and evaluated in phantom experiments have been applied for monitoring small temperature changes in volunteer's pelvis generated by a superficial heat source. Regions of temperature changes in 1/spl deg/C steps were segmented using pattern recognition operators of mathematical morphology. In this way, distributions of temperature changes measured by the proton resonance frequency method were successfully mapped in the entire pelvis. Thus, insight into the thermal propagation mechanism in pelvis was obtained revealing such thermoregulatory effects as, for example, cooling due to perspiration in regions not directly exposed to the heat supply. Applied with the methods exploiting the spin-lattice relaxation and diffusion as temperature indicators, the post-processing could not considerably improve the poor quality of temperature maps.