Cardiovascular diseases are common and life-threatening, making them the prime killer in the United States. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered a very promising candidate for clinical cardiac imaging, due in part to its safety, its image contrast and its flexibility in the positioning of imaging planes/volumes. The present work aims at improving the diagnostic value of cardiac MRI exams, with the understanding that an accurate diagnosis may lead to successful treatment and monitoring. A great challenge for MRI in cardiac applications comes from the need to freeze or resolve both cardiac and respiratory motions. Suppressing the respiratory motion through breath-holding is not an option for longer, more elaborate studies. Although respiratory-compensated, free-breathing cardiac imaging has been shown to provide useful clinical information, further performance improvements are believed to be limited chiefly by residual respiratory blurring/artifacts. The novel approach at respiratory-compensation introduced here is expected to detect and correct respiratory motion much more accurately/completely than existing strategies, hopefully increasing spatial resolution through a reduction in blurring. Very fast 3D imaging will be developed to resolve the respiratory cycle. Respiration-monitoring stretchable belts, a standard product available with essentially any MRI scanner, provide a very high temporal resolution account of how respiration proceeds during a scan. The wealth of spatial/geometrical information provided by our fast 3D imaging sequence will be fused with the very high temporal resolution information from a respiration-monitoring belt, to detect and correct for the spatially and temporally complex respiration-induced motion and deformation of the heart. Once the data will be corrected for the effect of respiration, it will be converted from a time series of images (where respiratory motion can be detected and corrected) to a cardiac-phase series of images (where the cardiac beating motion can be seen). As a result, a respiratory-compensated cardiac-phase series of 3D images of the heart will be generated. This approach has the potential of being especially useful in patients for whom breath-holding is not an option, e.g. when imaging very sick, mentally impaired or infant patients.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01HL073319-03
Application #
6898760
Study Section
Diagnostic Imaging Study Section (DMG)
Program Officer
Buxton, Denis B
Project Start
2003-07-01
Project End
2007-06-30
Budget Start
2005-07-01
Budget End
2007-06-30
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$389,250
Indirect Cost
Name
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Department
Type
DUNS #
030811269
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02115
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Madore, Bruno; Panych, Lawrence P; Mei, Chang-Sheng et al. (2011) Multipathway sequences for MR thermometry. Magn Reson Med 66:658-68
Mei, Chang-Sheng; Panych, Lawrence P; Yuan, Jing et al. (2011) Combining two-dimensional spatially selective RF excitation, parallel imaging, and UNFOLD for accelerated MR thermometry imaging. Magn Reson Med 66:112-22
Chao, Tzu-Cheng; Chung, Hsiao-Wen; Hoge, W Scott et al. (2010) A 2D MTF approach to evaluate and guide dynamic imaging developments. Magn Reson Med 63:407-18
Ababneh, Riad; Yuan, Jing; Madore, Bruno (2010) Fat-water separation in dynamic objects using an UNFOLD-like temporal processing. J Magn Reson Imaging 32:962-70
Madore, Bruno; White, P Jason; Thomenius, Kai et al. (2009) Accelerated focused ultrasound imaging. IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control 56:2612-23
Madore, Bruno; Hoge, W Scott; Kwong, Raymond (2006) Extension of the UNFOLD method to include free breathing. Magn Reson Med 55:352-62
Madore, Bruno; Farneback, Gunnar; Westin, Carl-Fredrik et al. (2006) A new strategy for respiration compensation, applied toward 3D free-breathing cardiac MRI. Magn Reson Imaging 24:727-37
Zhao, Lei; Madore, Bruno; Panych, Lawrence P (2005) Reduced field-of-view MRI with two-dimensional spatially-selective RF excitation and UNFOLD. Magn Reson Med 53:1118-25
Madore, Bruno (2004) UNFOLD-SENSE: a parallel MRI method with self-calibration and artifact suppression. Magn Reson Med 52:310-20