Highly-accelerated self-gated free-breathing 3D cardiac cine MRI: validation in assessment of left ventricular function

Abstract

Object This work presents a highly-accelerated, self-gated, free-breathing 3D cardiac cine MRI method for cardiac function assessment. Materials and Methods A golden-ratio profile based variable-density, pseudo-random, Cartesian undersampling scheme was implemented for continuous 3D data acquisition. Respiratory self-gating was achieved by deriving motion signal from the acquired MRI data. A multi-coil compressed sensing technique was employed to reconstruct 4D images (3D+time). 3D cardiac cine imaging with self-gating was compared to bellows gating and the clinical standard breath-held 2D cine imaging for evaluation of self-gating accuracy, image quality, and cardiac function in eight volunteers. Reproducibility of 3D imaging was assessed. Results Self-gated 3D imaging provided an image quality score of 3.4 ± 0.7 v.s. 4.0±0 with the 2D method (p=0.06). It determined left ventricular end-systolic volume as 42.4±11.5mL, end-diastolic volume as 111.1±24.7 mL, and ejection fraction as 62.0±3.1%, which were comparable to the 2D method, with bias±1.96×std of −0.8±7.5 mL (p=0.90), 2.6±3.3mL (p=0.84) and 1.4±6.4% (p=0.45) respectively. Conclusion The proposed 3D cardiac cine imaging method enables reliable respiratory self-gating performance with good reproducibility, and provides comparable image quality and functional measurements to 2D imaging, suggesting that self-gated, free-breathing 3D cardiac cine MRI framework is promising for improved patient comfort and cardiac MRI scan efficiency.

Accelerated whole brain intracranial vessel wall imaging using black blood fast spin echo with compressed sensing (CS-SPACE)

“…The use of 32 channel or 64 channel head coils has potential to further improve the image quality. Although Poisson-Disk has been accepted as an efficient algorithm for generating random under-sampling patterns, several methods, including our previously developed method CIRCUS [29], have been developed for providing smoother transitions in the view ordering, especially for gradient echo sequences, that help avoid eddy current errors.…”

Highly accelerated intracranial 4D flow MRI: evaluation of healthy volunteers and patients with intracranial aneurysms

“…The same sampling pattern was applied for the phase reference and three velocity encodings. With CIRCUS acquisition, the sampling patterns at different time points during the cardiac cycle were interleaved [42]. Undersampled datasets with CIRCUS acquisition were reconstructed with k-t SPARSE-SENSE [45,46], by using a multi-coil CS reconstruction which exploits joint sparsity along the temporal dimension using a total variation constraint.…”

“…More importantly, CIRCUS provides flexible interleaving schemes by employing a golden-ratio based profile, which allows for retrospective gating. CIRCUS has first been evaluated by obtaining retrospective undersampling from the fully acquired data [38] and then been implemented and performed prospectively for applications including 3D cardiac CINE MRI and 3D dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI [42,43]. …”

Fully automatic segmentation of 4D MRI for cardiac functional measurements

“…Zhang et al used a landmark-based method to segment the LV and RV, which may be sensitive to the landmark template. In this study, we developed a segmentation method that has been applied to data from a highly accelerated 4D (3D+t) cardiac cine MRI approach developed by our team 33 , that achieves whole heart coverage in a scan time of ~2.5 minutes during free-breathing. This study investigated a segmentation method without use of training data for achieving cardiac functional measurements based on 4D cardiac MRI data acquired in a short scan time, an advance that we believe could be helpful in clinical practice.…”