Single-heartbeat cardiac cine imaging via jointly regularized nonrigid motion-corrected reconstruction

Gastao Cruz; Kerstin Hammernik; Thomas Kuestner; Carlos Velasco; Alina Hua; Tevfik Fehmi Ismail; Daniel Rueckert; Rene Michael Botnar; Claudia Prieto

doi:10.1002/nbm.4942

Single-heartbeat cardiac cine imaging via jointly regularized nonrigid motion-corrected reconstruction

NMR Biomed. 2023 Mar 30;36(9):e4942. doi: 10.1002/nbm.4942. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Gastao Cruz¹, Kerstin Hammernik^{2

3}, Thomas Kuestner^{1

4}, Carlos Velasco¹, Alina Hua¹, Tevfik Fehmi Ismail¹, Daniel Rueckert^{2

3}, Rene Michael Botnar^{1

5

6}, Claudia Prieto^{1

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, UK.
² Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK.
³ Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Informatics in Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
⁴ Medical Image and Data Analysis, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
⁵ Escuela de Ingeniería, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
⁶ Millennium Institute for Intelligent Healthcare Engineering, Santiago, Chile.

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to develop a novel approach for 2D breath-hold cardiac cine imaging from a single heartbeat, by combining cardiac motion-corrected reconstructions and nonrigidly aligned patch-based regularization. Conventional cardiac cine imaging is obtained via motion-resolved reconstructions of data acquired over multiple heartbeats. Here, we achieve single-heartbeat cine imaging by incorporating nonrigid cardiac motion correction into the reconstruction of each cardiac phase, in conjunction with a motion-aligned patch-based regularization. The proposed Motion-Corrected CINE (MC-CINE) incorporates all acquired data into the reconstruction of each (motion-corrected) cardiac phase, resulting in a better posed problem than motion-resolved approaches. MC-CINE was compared with iterative sensitivity encoding (itSENSE) and Extra-Dimensional Golden Angle Radial Sparse Parallel (XD-GRASP) in 14 healthy subjects in terms of image sharpness, reader scoring (range: 1-5) and reader ranking (range: 1-9) of image quality, and single-slice left ventricular assessment. MC-CINE was significantly superior to both itSENSE and XD-GRASP using 20 heartbeats, two heartbeats, and one heartbeat. Iterative SENSE, XD-GRASP, and MC-CINE achieved a sharpness of 74%, 74%, and 82% using 20 heartbeats, and 53%, 66%, and 82% with one heartbeat, respectively. The corresponding results for reader scoring were 4.0, 4.7, and 4.9 with 20 heartbeats, and 1.1, 3.0, and 3.9 with one heartbeat. The corresponding results for reader ranking were 5.3, 7.3, and 8.6 with 20 heartbeats, and 1.0, 3.2, and 5.4 with one heartbeat. MC-CINE using a single heartbeat presented nonsignificant differences in image quality to itSENSE with 20 heartbeats. MC-CINE and XD-GRASP at one heartbeat both presented a nonsignificant negative bias of less than 2% in ejection fraction relative to the reference itSENSE. It was concluded that the proposed MC-CINE significantly improves image quality relative to itSENSE and XD-GRASP, enabling 2D cine from a single heartbeat.

Keywords: CINE; cardiac MR; compressed sensing; motion correction; single-heartbeat.

Abstract

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