Adaptive black blood fast spin echo for end‐systolic rest cardiac imaging

Abstract

Black Blood Fast Spin Echo imaging of the heart is usually performed during mid-diastolic rest. This is a direct consequence of the long inversion time required to suppress the blood signal, which is constrained by the T 1 of the blood, and of the heart rate. To overcome these constraints, and to acquire black blood images in the end-systolic rest period, a new approach is introduced aiming at adaptively predicting the best time to prepare and acquire MR signals. It is based on a RR interval prediction algorithm and on a cardiac cycle model. The proposed method was applied to 14 healthy volunteers and is compared to a simple alternative method using a fixed delay and to the standard black blood imaging method for imaging in the middiastolic rest period. Results show that the proposed method offers an increased robustness in terms of trigger delay error and image quality compared to the tested simple alternative. Also, it has been shown by qualitative analysis done by an experienced observer that the right ventricle, especially the thin right ventricle free wall, is better depicted with our method than with the standard mid-diastolic rest acquisition. Magn Reson Med 64:1760-1771, 2010.

A Database of Electrocardiogram Signals Acquired in Different Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanners

“…ECG-based gating requires the detection of the ECG's QRS complexes or R-peaks. Since the raw MRI data (kspace data) is collected over several cardiac cycles to reconstruct a complete MR image, data should be acquired from normal rhythm heart beats only and in a certain phase of the certain cycle [5,9]. Hence, changes in the heart rhythm such as ectopic beats should be detected in order to pause data acquisition in those periods.…”