A Comparison Between Novel FPGA-Based Pad Monitoring System Using Ballistocardiography and the Conventional Systems for Synchronization and Gating of CMRI at 3 Tesla: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This pilot pre-clinical study demonstrates the applicability of a new type of pneumatic cardiac triggering (PCT) for cardiac imaging. The pilot research compares the novel FPGA-based pad monitoring system for cardiac triggering using ballistocardiography (BCG) with conventional systems based on electrocardiography (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG). The implemented system enables cardiac triggering without the need to fix the sensors to the patient's body. This unique approach has the potential to reduce the preparation time for examination and the examination itself and to increase patient's comfort. The pilot pre-clinical study was conducted on 10 subjects at the Siemens Prisma 3T MRI Scanner within the

A Comparison of Alternative Approaches to MR Cardiac Triggering: A Pilot Study at 3 Tesla

“…The use of the proposed sensors can lead to higher image sharpness and noise reduction, thus increasing the quality of acquired images. In general, the study provided additional information on the proposed systems, which have been already the objects of our previous papers, see [18], [48], [51], [54], [55].…”

“…The sensor can be placed under the patient in a supine position or on the patient's chest. The FBG sensors reached very high accuracy in estimation of heart rate exceeding 95% when using field intensity up to 3 T [43], [48], [51]- [54]. The gained precision and resistance to artifacts from the MR environment promise the successful usability of FBG sensors in synchronization of MRI.…”

“…The pneumatic sensor was developed based on the previous research published in [54], [57]. The previous version of the sensor was integrated into the pad monitoring system located under the entirety of the patient's body.…”

“…Moreover, this system was also sensitive to the interference produced by the MR scanner itself. In [54], this issue was solved by an adaptive filtering system.…”

“…In this paper, the triggering performance is evaluated from the view of the image quality since the proposed measuring systems proved their accuracy of heart rate detection by Bland-Altman analysis in the previous studies. From the calculated number of false positive and false negative detections, the mean accuracy was determined as 96.31% for P-BCG and 95.23% for O-BCG [48], [54].…”