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Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance
Published in: Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance 1/2017

Open Access 01-12-2017 | Technical notes

Real-time phase-contrast flow cardiovascular magnetic resonance with low-rank modeling and parallel imaging

Authors: Aiqi Sun, Bo Zhao, Yunduo Li, Qiong He, Rui Li, Chun Yuan

Published in: Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance | Issue 1/2017

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Abstract

Background

Conventional phase-contrast cardiovascular magnetic resonance (PC-CMR) employs cine-based acquisitions to assess blood flow condition, in which electro-cardiogram (ECG) gating and respiration control are generally required. This often results in lower acquisition efficiency, and limited utility in the presence of cardiovascular pathology (e.g., cardiac arrhythmia). Real-time PC-CMR, without ECG gating and respiration control, is a promising alternative that could overcome limitations of the conventional approach. But real-time PC-CMR involves image reconstruction from highly undersampled (k, t)-space data, which is very challenging. In this study, we present a novel model-based imaging method to enable high-resolution real-time PC-CMR with sparse sampling.

Methods

The proposed method captures spatiotemporal correlation among flow-compensated and flow-encoded image sequences with a novel low-rank model. The image reconstruction problem is then formulated as a low-rank matrix recovery problem. With proper temporal subspace modeling, it results in a convex optimization formulation. We further integrate this formulation with the SENSE-based parallel imaging model to handle multichannel acquisitions. The performance of the proposed method was systematically evaluated in 2D real-time PC-CMR with flow phantom experiments and in vivo experiments (with healthy subjects). Additionally, we performed a feasibility study of the proposed method on patients with cardiac arrhythmia.

Results

The proposed method achieves a spatial resolution of 1.8 mm and a temporal resolution of 18 ms for 2D real-time PC-CMR with one directional flow encoding. For the flow phantom experiments, both regular and irregular flow patterns were accurately captured. For the in vivo experiments with healthy subjects, flow dynamics obtained from the proposed method correlated well with those from the cine-based acquisitions. For the experiments with the arrhythmic patients, the proposed method demonstrated excellent capability of resolving the beat-by-beat flow variations, which cannot be obtained from the conventional cine-based method.

Conclusion

The proposed method enables high-resolution real-time PC-CMR at 2D without ECG gating and respiration control. It accurately resolves beat-by-beat flow variations, which holds great promise for studying patients with irregular heartbeats.
Appendix
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Metadata
Title
Real-time phase-contrast flow cardiovascular magnetic resonance with low-rank modeling and parallel imaging
Authors
Aiqi Sun
Bo Zhao
Yunduo Li
Qiong He
Rui Li
Chun Yuan
Publication date
01-12-2017
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance / Issue 1/2017
Electronic ISSN: 1532-429X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12968-017-0330-1

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