Real-time cardiovascular MRI and co-registration technical development

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During the past year we have continued enhancement of imaging platforms to guide cardiovascular catheter based treatments. These have included co-registered MRI with conventional X-ray, as well as standalone real-time MRI. We are working closely with industry to introduce motion-corrected roadmaps into clinical practice. We continue to enhance a system for safe patient hemodynamic monitoring and recording during interventional MRI experiments and during transfer between X-ray and MRI. We are applying this work towards adults and children undergoing MRI catheterization, and we are working internally and with industry to enhance this technology. Our collaborator Michael S. Hansen has used inexpensive parallel computing resources afforded by game-oriented graphics processing units to accelerate reconstruction of computationally-intensive MRI data. We have successfully integrated non-Cartesian parallel imaging in an interactive acquisition and reconstruction setup and demonstrated that real-time reconstruction and visualization is possible for relatively complicated reconstruction algorithms. This has been integrated with the scanner software to allow seamless combination with other sequence components. This has been disseminated as an open-source image-streaming framework that has become very popular with extensive applications in biomedical imaging. We have developed a system to provide the operator multiple simultaneous representations of real-time MRI data balancing temporal and spatial resolution interactively. The operator chooses the desired representation. We are developing techniques of MRI that minimize heating of metallic devices, that might allow MRI catheterization using tools previously considered unsafe, or that might enhance the safety of MRI in patients who have implanted devices like pacemakers and defibrillators. We are working closely with industry to transfer our developments into commercial tools that can be used widely in medical care throughout the world.