Free-Breathing 3D Cardiac MR Imaging

描述(由申请人提供)： 心血管疾病很常见，危及生命，使其成为美国的头号杀手。磁共振成像(MRI)被认为是一种非常有前途的临床心脏成像候选，部分原因是它的安全性、图像对比度和成像平面/体积的灵活定位。本工作旨在提高心脏MRI检查的诊断价值，认识到准确的诊断可能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冻结或解析心脏和呼吸运动的需要。通过屏住呼吸来抑制呼吸运动不是更长、更精细的研究的选择。虽然呼吸代偿、自由呼吸的心脏成像已被证明提供了有用的临床信息，但进一步的性能改善被认为主要受到残留的呼吸模糊/伪影的限制。这里介绍的呼吸补偿的新方法有望比现有的方法更准确/完全地检测和纠正呼吸运动，希望通过减少模糊来提高空间分辨率。将开发非常快速的3D成像来解析呼吸周期。呼吸监测可伸缩腰带是几乎所有MRI扫描仪都有的标准产品，它提供了非常高的时间分辨率，说明了扫描期间呼吸是如何进行的。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在一起，以检测和校正由呼吸引起的空间和时间复杂的心脏运动和变形。一旦数据将针对呼吸的影响进行校正，它将从时间序列图像(其中可以检测和校正呼吸运动)转换为心脏相图像序列(其中可以看到心脏跳动)。结果，将生成心脏的呼吸代偿心脏相序列的3D图像。这种方法有可能在屏气不能选择的患者中特别有用，例如在对病情严重的患者、精神障碍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.