- Poster presentation
- Open Access
- Published:
High-quality reconstruction of arrhythmic cardiac cycles
Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance volume 18, Article number: P6 (2016)
Background
The current clinical standard in cardiac functional MRI is retrospectively gated cine MRI. The technique is relying on a regular heart beat and cardiac cycles showing substantial deviation from the mean heart rate are excluded, often causing reduced image quality and completely suppressing arrhythmic cycles. We introduce a new correlation based self-gating approach enabling reconstruction of the entire cardiac motion including arrhythmic sections at high image quality.
Methods
Study Population and MRI protocol
Dynamic short axis time-resolved cardiac data sets were acquired at 1.5T from three patients (2 women, 1 man, aged 79 to 83 years) with known severe cardiac arrhythmia resulting in varying cardiac cycle length even during a short 6.3 second breathhold. All data were obtained with a 32-element cardiac coil applying a tiny golden angle (Ψ7≈23.628°) [1] radial balanced SSFP sequence with TR / TE = 2.6 / 1.3 ms, flip angle = 60°, resolution 1.72 mm2, slice thickness 8 mm, and acquisition matrix 2122.
Reconstruction
The data were reconstructed applying the proposed non-uniform image-based self-gating technique (nuSG [2]), real-time compressed sensing reconstruction (GRASP [3]), and classical retrospective cardiac self-gating (SG). M-mode data were calculated from the short-axis images for better appreciation of arrhythmic cycles.
Analysis
The visibility of the arrhythmic cycles was assessed in the M-mode data. Furthermore, end-systolic and end-diastolic endocardial areas and image sharpness was compared between the investigated reconstruction techniques.
Results
Figure 1 shows exemplarily the resulting images and M-modes for one patient. Arrhythmic cycles can be well appreciated in the M-mode images obtained from the nuSG and GRASP reconstructions. Visually, the images from SG have more residual streaking artifacts and appear less sharp than the images from nuSG and the nuSG shows superior SNR compared to GRASP. nuSG resulted in an average improvement of the wall sharpness of up to 96%.. Endocardial areas (ED [ml]/ES [ml]) resulted as 15.7 ± 2.3 / 7.7 ± 2.5 (SG), 15.6 ± 1.1 / 8.4 ± 1.1 (nuSG), and 15.7 ± 2.1 / 11 ± 1.3 (GRASP).
Conclusions
In conclusion, a new self-gating method was proposed that allows CMR of arrhythmic patients at high image quality, maintaining the information of the arrhythmic cycles in the resulting images. Compared to real-time techniques, the nuSG technique provides higher SNR and image sharpness.
References
Wundrak S, et al: IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2015, 34 (6): 1262-1269.
Wundrak S, et al: Proc. ISMRM 23rd annual meeting. 2015, 3678-
Feng L, et al: Magn Reson Med. 2012, 72 (3): 707-717.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Wundrak, S., Paul, J., Radermacher, M. et al. High-quality reconstruction of arrhythmic cardiac cycles. J Cardiovasc Magn Reson 18 (Suppl 1), P6 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/1532-429X-18-S1-P6
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1532-429X-18-S1-P6
Keywords
- High Image Quality
- Image Sharpness
- Reduce Image Quality
- Balance SSFP
- Arrhythmic Patient