Assessment of cardiac volumes using an isotropic whole‐heart dual cardiac phase sequence in pediatric patients

Abstract

The 3D DP technique provides as accurate cardiac volumes as the 2D SSFP technique in the pediatric population, but with the added benefits of easier data acquisition and detailed anatomical information of the whole heart and great vessels in a single free-breathing scan.

Comparison between Three-Dimensional Navigator-Gated Whole-Heart MRI and Two-Dimensional Cine MRI in Quantifying Ventricular Volumes

“…This study demonstrated that the stroke volumes calculated from the ventricular volumes had good correlations with the arterial flow volumes measured by the phase-contrast MRI (the reference standard), slightly higher for the 2D cine MRI than for the 3D whole-heart MRI ( Table 2 ). Noteworthy, the results of this study were different from others reporting ventricular volume quantification of 3D whole-heart MRI that displayed comparable or higher correlations and reproducibility with those of flow measurements or 2D short-axis cine MRI ( 5 6 7 ). Instead of 3D threshold-based segmentation used in this study that is a very accurate and reproducible method, less accurate methods were used in their studies, such as a deformable simplex mesh model for 3D whole-heart MRI ( 5 6 ) and a 2D threshold-based segmentation for both the reformatted 3D whole-heart MRI in short-axis plane and the 2D short-axis cine MRI ( 7 ).…”

“…Noteworthy, the results of this study were different from others reporting ventricular volume quantification of 3D whole-heart MRI that displayed comparable or higher correlations and reproducibility with those of flow measurements or 2D short-axis cine MRI ( 5 6 7 ). Instead of 3D threshold-based segmentation used in this study that is a very accurate and reproducible method, less accurate methods were used in their studies, such as a deformable simplex mesh model for 3D whole-heart MRI ( 5 6 ) and a 2D threshold-based segmentation for both the reformatted 3D whole-heart MRI in short-axis plane and the 2D short-axis cine MRI ( 7 ). Substantial underestimation of ED volumes, especially for the RV, quantified by using the 3D whole-heart MRI in this investigation seemed to be chiefly caused by early timing of the ED phase in spite of the longest trigger delay.…”

“…Therefore, other segmentation methods have been developed to decrease these errors ( 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 ). Of these, a threshold-based segmentation is an effective method separating the ventricular cavity from the myocardium which includes the papillary muscles and trabeculations based on pixel or voxel signal intensities ( 7 8 9 11 12 13 14 15 ). In addition, a three-dimensional (3D) analysis can avoid an error (about 20%) caused by disc summation of 2D slices ( 16 ).…”

“…Only a single research group has reported comparable or higher correlations and reproducibility of ventricular volumetry utilizing 3D whole-heart MRI, compared with that using a phase contrast MRI or 2D short-axis cine MRI ( 5 6 7 ). However, in these studies, a deformable simplex mesh model ( 5 6 ) or a 2D threshold-based segmentation ( 7 ) was used for segmenting 3D whole-heart MRI data. Theoretically, the 3D threshold-based segmentation methodology is expected to further improve accuracy of 3D whole-heart MRI in ventricular volume quantification, if their results hold true.…”

Accelerating dual cardiac phase images using undersampled radial phase encoding trajectories

“…This was mainly due to the length of the protocol. Nevertheless, it has been previously shown that the dual cardiac phase technique provides accurate cardiac volume assessment in adult [8] and pediatric patients with congenital heart diseases [22].…”