Purpose: To develop a 3D magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) method for application in high resolution knee cartilage PD, T1 , T2 mapping. Materials and Methods: A novel 3D acquisition trajectory with golden-angle rotating radial in kxy direction and interleaved echo planar imaging (EPI) acquisition in the kz direction was implemented in the MRF framework. A centric order was applied to the interleaved EPI acquisition to reduce Nyquist ghosting artifact due to field inhomogeneity. For the reconstruction, singular value decomposition (SVD) compression method was used to accelerate reconstruction time and conjugate gradient sensitivity-encoding (CG-SENSE) was performed to overcome low SNR of the high resolution data. Phantom experiments were performed to verify the proposed method. In vivo experiments were performed on 6 healthy volunteers and 2 early osteoarthritis (OA) patients. Results: In the phantom experiments, the T1 and T2 values of the proposed method were in good agreement with the spin-echo references. The results from the in vivo scans showed high quality proton density (PD), T1 , T2 map with EPI echo train length (NETL = 4), acceleration factor in through plane (Rz = 5), and number of radial spokes (Nspk = 4). In patients, high T2 values (50-60 ms) were seen in all transverse, sagittal, and coronal views and the damaged cartilage regions were in agreement with the hyper-intensity regions shown on conventional turbo spin-echo (TSE) images. Conclusion The proposed 3D MRF method can acquire high resolution (0.5 mm3 ) quantitative maps in practical scan time (~ 7 min and 10 sec) with full coverage of the knee (FOV: 160 × 160 × 120 mm3 ).

Purpose: To develop a 3D magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) method for application in high resolution knee cartilage PD, T1 , T2 mapping. Materials and Methods: A novel 3D acquisition trajectory with golden-angle rotating radial in kxy direction and interleaved echo planar imaging (EPI) acquisition in the kz direction was implemented in the MRF framework. A centric order was applied to the interleaved EPI acquisition to reduce Nyquist ghosting artifact due to field inhomogeneity. For the reconstruction, singular value decomposition (SVD) compression method was used to accelerate reconstruction time and conjugate gradient sensitivity-encoding (CG-SENSE) was performed to overcome low SNR of the high resolution data. Phantom experiments were performed to verify the proposed method. In vivo experiments were performed on 6 healthy volunteers and 2 early osteoarthritis (OA) patients. Results: In the phantom experiments, the T1 and T2 values of the proposed method were in good agreement with the spin-echo references. The results from the in vivo scans showed high quality proton density (PD), T1 , T2 map with EPI echo train length (NETL = 4), acceleration factor in through plane (Rz = 5), and number of radial spokes (Nspk = 4). In patients, high T2 values (50-60 ms) were seen in all transverse, sagittal, and coronal views and the damaged cartilage regions were in agreement with the hyper-intensity regions shown on conventional turbo spin-echo (TSE) images. Conclusion The proposed 3D MRF method can acquire high resolution (0.5 mm3 ) quantitative maps in practical scan time (~ 7 min and 10 sec) with full coverage of the knee (FOV: 160 × 160 × 120 mm3 ).

Background/Aims: Most studies on hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP) have been conducted in intensive care unit (ICU) settings. This study aimed to investigate the microbiological and clinical characteristics of non-ICU-acquired pneumonia (NIAP) and to identify the factors affecting clinical outcomes in Korea. Methods: This multicenter retrospective cohort study was conducted in patients admitted to 13 tertiary hospitals between July 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. Patients diagnosed with NIAP were included in this study. To assess the prognostic factors of NIAP, the study population was classified into treatment success and failure groups. Results: Of 526 patients with HAP, 379 were diagnosed with NIAP. Overall, the identified causative pathogen rate was 34.6% in the study population. Among the isolated organisms (n = 113), gram-negative bacilli were common pathogens (n = 91), such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa (n = 25), Acinetobacter baumannii (n = 23), and Klebsiella pneumoniae (n = 21). The multidrug resistance rates of A. baumannii, P. aeruginosa, and K. pneumoniae were 91.3%, 76.0%, and 57.1%, respectively. Treatment failure was significantly associated with K. pneumoniae (odds ratio [OR], 3.50; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.35 to 9.05; p = 0.010), respiratory viruses (OR, 3.81; 95% CI, 1.34 to 10.82; p = 0.012), hematological malignancies (OR, 3.54; 95% CI, 1.57 to 8.00; p = 0.002), and adjunctive corticosteroid treatment (OR, 2.40; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.52; p = 0.007). Conclusions The causative pathogens of NIAP in Korea are predominantly gram-negative bacilli with a high rate of multidrug resistance. These were not different from the common pathogens of ICU-acquired pneumonia.