Swallowing, arterial pulsation, and breathing induce motion artifacts in carotid artery MRI

Abstract

Purpose: To identify and quantify the potential sources of motion in carotid artery imaging. Materials and Methods:Two healthy volunteers and 12 patients (20 -75 years old) with atherosclerotic disease were scanned on a Philips Intera 1.5T system. A single-shot balanced-fast field echo (bFFE) sequence was used to acquire real-time axial views of the carotid artery wall (three images per second). A three-step acquisition protocol was performed to analyze the three types of motion (arterial pulsation, breathing, and swallowing) separately. The isocenter carotid artery motion amplitude in either the x or y direction was measured. Radial variation in the carotid lumen between the systolic and diastolic phases was analyzed. Motion frequency was reported for each patient.Results: Significant motion related to arterial pulsation (amplitude ϭ 0.27-0.93 mm, mean ϭ 0.6, SD ϭ 0.19), breathing (amplitude ϭ 0.5-3.6 mm, mean ϭ 1.56, SD ϭ 0.99)), and swallowing (amplitude ϭ 1.4 -9.2 mm, mean ϭ 4.7, SD ϭ 2.4) were visualized. Conclusion:Pulsation, breathing, and swallowing are sources of significant motion in the carotid artery wall. Such motion should be considered in the future to improve carotid artery image quality.

Phase-Sensitive Dual-Inversion Recovery for Accelerated Carotid Vessel Wall Imaging

“…Nevertheless, 3D acquisitions are more sensitive to motion because of the prolonged scanning times. 37 Volumetric DIR preparation has demonstrated to be effective for limited slab thicknesses, 38,39 and an extension of the proposed PS technique to 3D imaging seems straightforward. For larger volumes, excellent blood suppression has been demonstrated with motionsensitized techniques.…”

Local excitation black blood imaging at 3T: Application to the carotid artery wall

“…The scan efficiency of the local excitation approach is significantly higher than for the conventional technique considering the coverage of a 150-mm volume of interest into foot head orientation. Although the overall acquisition time results in only 6 min for Ϸ13 cm coverage, most patients will face problems suppressing swallowing reflexes and the respective swallowing motion is likely to cause motion artifacts in the images (5). However, in the localized imaging approach no distinct swallowing motion artifacts were observed.…”

“…Without compromising spatial resolution due to severe T 2 apodization, this technique allows for the acquisition of a single slice in the minute time range, while providing excellent lumen-wall contrast and enabling differently weighted images including T 2 (T 2 W), proton density (PDW) and, limited by the required inversion recovery time for blood signal nulling and heart rate, T 1 weighting (T 1 W). The extension of this technique to 3D coverage of large sections of the artery of interest has been limited by the resulting long acquisition times, often causing image-distorting motion artifacts (5) due to swallowing, arterial pulsation, breathing, and suboptimal blood suppression (6,7) due to incomplete exchange of the blood in the entire volume. Improvement of blood suppression has been obtained by utilizing phasesensitive reconstruction techniques (8) and diffusion-prepared techniques (9,10,12), all relying rather on the motion of the blood than on complete blood exchange between preparation and readout.…”

Novel technique used to detect swallowing in volume‐selective turbo spin‐echo (TSE) for carotid artery wall imaging

“…A consequence is the need to repeat in full the entire 3D scan rather than a single corrupted 2D slice. A variety of factors, such as breathing and arterial pulsation, can degrade the quality of the images (12). This has been specifically noted when imaging in vivo carotid arteries using 3D volume-selective TSE sequences (13).…”