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Functional imaging of murine hearts using accelerated self-gated UTE cine MRI

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Abstract

We introduce a fast protocol for ultra-short echo time (UTE) Cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the beating murine heart. The sequence involves a self-gated UTE with golden-angle radial acquisition and compressed sensing reconstruction. The self-gated acquisition is performed asynchronously with the heartbeat, resulting in a randomly undersampled kt-space that facilitates compressed sensing reconstruction. The sequence was tested in 4 healthy rats and 4 rats with chronic myocardial infarction, approximately 2 months after surgery. As a control, a non-accelerated self-gated multi-slice FLASH sequence with an echo time (TE) of 2.76 ms, 4.5 signal averages, a matrix of 192 × 192, and an acquisition time of 2 min 34 s per slice was used to obtain Cine MRI with 15 frames per heartbeat. Non-accelerated UTE MRI was performed with TE = 0.29 ms, a reconstruction matrix of 192 × 192, and an acquisition time of 3 min 47 s per slice for 3.5 averages. Accelerated imaging with 2×, 4× and 5× undersampled kt-space data was performed with 1 min, 30 and 15 s acquisitions, respectively. UTE Cine images up to 5× undersampled kt-space data could be successfully reconstructed using a compressed sensing algorithm. In contrast to the FLASH Cine images, flow artifacts in the UTE images were nearly absent due to the short echo time, simplifying segmentation of the left ventricular (LV) lumen. LV functional parameters derived from the control and the accelerated Cine movies were statistically identical.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Leonie Niesen for biotechnical assistance.

Conflict of interest

None.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biomedical NMR, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Abdallah G. Motaal, Nils Noorman, Wolter L. de Graaf, Klaas Nicolay & Gustav J. Strijkers

  2. Center for Imaging Research and Education (CIRE), Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Abdallah G. Motaal, Nils Noorman, Wolter L. de Graaf, Klaas Nicolay & Gustav J. Strijkers

  3. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Abdallah G. Motaal & Luc M. J. Florack

  4. Department of Clinical Radiology, University Hospital of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Verena Hoerr

  5. Department of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gustav J. Strijkers

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  1. Abdallah G. Motaal
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  2. Nils Noorman
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Correspondence to Abdallah G. Motaal.

Electronic supplementary material

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10554_2014_531_MOESM1_ESM.gif

Supplementary material 1 Comparison between FLASH and UTE Cine movie of a mid-ventricular short axis slice with 15 cardiac time frames (standard.gif) (GIF 1596 kb)

10554_2014_531_MOESM2_ESM.gif

Supplementary material 2 Mid-ventricular short-axis Cine movie of a healthy rat heart with 15 frames obtained from a 4X undersampled acquisition and compressed sensing reconstruction (shortaxes4x.gif) (GIF 876 kb)

10554_2014_531_MOESM3_ESM.gif

Supplementary material 3 Mid-ventricular short-axis Cine movie of a rat heart with myocardial infarction with 15 frames obtained from a 5X undersampled acquisition and compressed sensing reconstruction (shortaxes5x.gif) (GIF 840 kb)

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Motaal, A.G., Noorman, N., de Graaf, W.L. et al. Functional imaging of murine hearts using accelerated self-gated UTE cine MRI. Int J Cardiovasc Imaging 31, 83–94 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-014-0531-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-014-0531-8

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