Extending Cardiac Functional Assessment with Respiratory-Resolved 3D Cine MRI

Jing Liu,Karen Ordovas,David Saloner,Zhaoying Wen,Ana Paula Santos Lima,Yan Wang,Vaikom S Mahadevan,Li Feng,Ann Bolger

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-47869-z

Abstract

This study aimed to develop a cardiorespiratory-resolved 3D magnetic resonance imaging (5D MRI: x-y-z-cardiac-respiratory) approach based on 3D motion tracking for investigating the influence of respiration on cardiac ventricular function. A highly-accelerated 2.5-minute sparse MR protocol was developed for a continuous acquisition of cardiac images through multiple cardiac and respiratory cycles. The heart displacement along respiration was extracted using a 3D image deformation algorithm, and this information was used to cluster the acquired data into multiple respiratory phases. The proposed approach was tested in 15 healthy volunteers (7 females). Cardiac function parameters, including the end-systolic volume (ESV), end-diastolic volume (EDV), stroke volume (SV), and ejection fraction (EF), were measured for the left and right ventricle in both end-expiration and end-inspiration. Although with the proposed 5D cardiac MRI, there were no significant differences (p > 0.05, t-test) between end-expiration and end-inspiration measurements of the cardiac function in volunteers, incremental respiratory motion parameters that were derived from 3D motion tracking, such as the depth, expiration and inspiration distribution, correlated (p < 0.05, correlation coefficient, Mann-Whitney) with those volume-based parameters of cardiac function and varied between genders. The obtained initial results suggested that this new approach allows evaluation of cardiac function during specific respiratory phases. Thus, it can enable investigation of effects related to respiratory variability and better assessment of cardiac function for studying respiratory and/or cardiac dysfunction.

Highlights

Respiratory-resolved cardiac functional assessment is a promising approach to overcome the abovementioned limitations
Www.nature.com/scientificreports evaluating the effects of respiratory motion on cardiac function, but most of them were based on 2D cardiac MRI7–9, which may suffer from slice misregistration errors
In order to achieve efficient selection of k-space data points for compressed sensing MRI, a number of undersampling strategies have been developed for continuously interleaved data acquisitions, and many of them can be implemented directly on a Cartesian grid[19,20,21,22,23,24] to provide favorable features of incoherent undersampling while minimizing the sensitivities to eddy current, offer-resonance effect, gradient delay, and some other effects presented in non-Cartesian trajectories

Summary

Introduction

Respiratory-resolved cardiac functional assessment is a promising approach to overcome the abovementioned limitations. In order to achieve efficient selection of k-space data points for compressed sensing MRI, a number of undersampling strategies have been developed for continuously interleaved data acquisitions, and many of them can be implemented directly on a Cartesian grid[19,20,21,22,23,24] to provide favorable features of incoherent undersampling while minimizing the sensitivities to eddy current, offer-resonance effect, gradient delay, and some other effects presented in non-Cartesian trajectories One of such underudersampling schemes, known as CIRcular Cartesian UnderSampling (CIRCUS)[25], has previously been demonstrated for several cardiac MRI applications, allowing pseudo-random variable-density and interleaving features for highly accelerated dynamic MRI16,26,27. The feasibility of the proposed 5D cardiac cine MRI method was demonstrated for assessment of cardiac function in normal volunteers by comparing quantification between end-expiration and end-inspiration and investigating the influence of respiration on the measurements of cardiac function

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Conclusion