Impact of Respiratory Gating on Hemodynamic Parameters from 4D Flow MRI

Esteban Denecken,Marcelo E Andia,Sergio Uribe,Cristobal Arrieta,Julio Sotelo

doi:10.3390/app12062943

Esteban Denecken, Marcelo E Andia + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app12062943

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Abstract

The hemodynamic parameters from 4D flow datasets have shown promising diagnostic value in different cardiovascular pathologies. However, the behavior of these parameters can be affected when the 4D flow data are corrupted by respiratory motion. The purpose of this work was to perform a quantitative comparison between hemodynamic parameters computed from 4D flow cardiac MRI both with and without respiratory self-gating. We considered 4D flow MRI data from 15 healthy volunteers (10 men and 5 women, 30.40 ± 6.23 years of age) that were acquired at 3T. Using a semiautomatic segmentation process of the aorta, we obtained the hemodynamic parameters from the 4D flow MRI, with and without respiratory self-gating. A statistical analysis, using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Bland–Altman, was performed to compare the hemodynamic parameters from both acquisitions. We found that the calculations of the hemodynamic parameters from 4D flow data that were acquired without respiratory self-gating showed underestimated values in the aortic arch, and the descending and diaphragmatic aorta. We also found a significant variability of the hemodynamic parameters in the ascending aorta of healthy volunteers when comparing both methods. The 4D flow MRI requires respiratory compensation to provide reliable calculations of hemodynamic parameters.

Highlights

IntroductionSeveral strategies have been proposed to suppress respiratory motion in cardiac MRI
Several strategies have been proposed to suppress respiratory motion in cardiac MRI.Most of these techniques are used to track the position of the diaphragm and can be combined with a respiratory-based k-space reordering scheme [1–6]
The coefficient of variation (CV) values were greater in the 4D flow data acquired without respiratory self-gating compared to the self-gated data

Summary

Introduction

Several strategies have been proposed to suppress respiratory motion in cardiac MRI Most of these techniques are used to track the position of the diaphragm and can be combined with a respiratory-based k-space reordering scheme [1–6]. These techniques include pencil beam navigators [1,2], cross-pair excitation to acquire a column of pixels across the lung-to-liver interface, self-gating strategies based on k0 points [3], k0 profiles [4] or 2D image navigators [5]. Newer approaches have achieved respiratory resolved cardiac images with a near 100% respiratory navigator efficiency [7,8]. These approaches have been used to obtain singleor dual-phase 3D whole heart balanced steady state free precession (b-SSFP) images [2], 2D or 3D b-SSFP cine images [9], and 4D flow MRI data [4]. There is a debate whether the use of respiratory motion compensation techniques improves the quantification of velocity-derived parameters from the 4D flow MRI [10]

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