Real-time pediatric cardiovascular MRI without breath holding, ECG monitoring or respiratory navigation



 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant) Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers an ideal approach to imaging congenital and acquired cardiovascular diseases in pediatric patients because it is non-invasive, radiation-free and information-rich. However, the general applicability of pediatric cardiovascular MRI is constrained by two challenges. First, currently available techniques cannot collect data faster than cardiac and respiratory motion. Second, children are uncooperative, unstable and vulnerable, making it difficult to employ conventional motion-control techniques that require patient cooperation, e.g., k-space segmentation with breath holding. To overcome these challenges, the proposed project will translate a novel high-speed MRI framework into a data acquisition paradigm that can image the moving heart in real-time. This framework, which is called "correlation imaging", can overcome the speed limit of available MRI techniques using linear data acquisition and image reconstruction strategies, providing a clinically translatable approach to improving the applicability of pediatric cardiovascular MRI. In this proposed 5-year project, we will translate correlation imaging into a real-time imaging tool that can collect data faster than cardiac and respiratory motion on clinical MRI scanners. We will establish a new real- time data acquisition paradigm for pediatric cardiovascular MRI examination without breath holding, electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring or respiratory navigation in our institution. In addition, we will develop an innovative Fourier analysis approach that can assess cardiovascular function by evaluating blood circulation periodicity from real-time images collected over a series of sequential cardiac cycles. We expect that the proposed research will transform pediatric cardiovascular MRI by reducing motion complications and thus improving disease prognosis and diagnosis. The proposed project will be carried out by a research team of experts from the fields of engineering, physics and cardiology. We will bridge the expertise of scientific, clinical and industrial researchers in order to translate our new high-speed data acquisition technique into pediatric cardiovascular MRI. Since imaging speed is a critical barrier to many areas of clinical MRI, however, our research promises an even more widespread impact on the field of clinical imaging.