Free-Breathing 3D Cardiac MR Imaging

描述（由申请人提供）： 心血管疾病是常见的和危及生命的，使他们在美国的首要杀手。磁共振成像（MRI）被认为是临床心脏成像的一种非常有前途的候选方法，部分原因是其安全性、图像对比度和成像平面/体积定位的灵活性。目前的工作旨在提高心脏MRI检查的诊断价值，了解准确的诊断可能会导致成功的治疗和监测。MRI在心脏应用中的一个巨大挑战来自于需要冻结或解决心脏和呼吸运动。通过屏气抑制呼吸运动不是更长、更精细研究的选择。尽管已经显示出补偿性自由呼吸心脏成像提供有用的临床信息，但是进一步的性能改进被认为主要受到残留呼吸模糊/伪影的限制。这里介绍的新的方法在呼吸补偿预计检测和校正呼吸运动更准确/完全比现有的策略，希望通过减少模糊增加空间分辨率。将开发非常快速的3D成像来解析呼吸周期。呼吸监测可拉伸带是基本上任何MRI扫描仪都可用的标准产品，它提供了非常高的时间分辨率，说明扫描期间呼吸如何进行。由我们的快速3D成像序列提供的丰富的空间/几何信息将与来自呼吸监测带的非常高的时间分辨率信息融合，以检测和校正空间和时间复杂的呼吸引起的心脏运动和变形。一旦数据将针对呼吸的影响进行校正，它将从图像的时间序列（其中可以检测和校正呼吸运动）转换为图像的心脏相位序列（其中可以看到心脏跳动运动）。结果，将生成心脏的3D图像的经补偿的心脏相位系列。这种方法有可能在屏气不是一种选择的患者中特别有用，例如，当对重病患者、精神受损患者或婴儿患者进行成像时。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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.