Quantification of myocardial perfusion with self-gated cardiovascular magnetic resonance

Current myocardial perfusion measurements make use of an ECG-gated pulse sequence to track the uptake and washout of a gadolinium-based contrast agent. The use of a gated acquisition is a problem in situations with a poor ECG signal. Recently, an ungated perfusion acquisition was proposed but it is not known how accurately quantitative perfusion estimates can be made from such datasets that are acquired without any triggering signal.

An undersampled saturation recovery radial turboFLASH pulse sequence was used in 7 subjects to acquire dynamic contrast-enhanced images during free-breathing. A single saturation pulse was followed by acquisition of 4–5 slices after a delay of ~40 msec. This was repeated without pause and without any type of gating. The same pulse sequence, with ECG-gating, was used to acquire gated data as a ground truth. An iterative spatio-temporal constrained reconstruction was used to reconstruct the undersampled images. After reconstruction, the ungated images were retrospectively binned (“self-gated”) into two cardiac phases using a region of interest based technique and deformably registered into near-systole and near-diastole. The gated and the self-gated datasets were then quantified with standard methods.

Regional myocardial blood flow estimates (MBFs) obtained using self-gated systole (0.64 ± 0.26 ml/min/g), self-gated diastole (0.64 ± 0.26 ml/min/g), and ECG-gated scans (0.65 ± 0.28 ml/min/g) were similar. Based on the criteria for interchangeable methods listed in the statistical analysis section, the MBF values estimated from self-gated and gated methods were not significantly different.

The self-gated technique for quantification of regional myocardial perfusion matched ECG-gated perfusion measurements well in normal subjects at rest. Self-gated systolic perfusion values matched ECG-gated perfusion values better than did diastolic values.