Cardiac and respiratory MRI gating using combined wavelet sub-band decomposition and adaptive filtering

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) requires synchronization to overcome motion related artifacts caused by the heart's contractions and the chest wall movements during respiration. Achieving good image quality necessitates combining cardiac and respiratory gating to produce, in real time, a trigger signal that sets off the consecutive image acquisitions. This guarantees that the data collection always starts at the same point of the cardiac cycle during the exhalation phase. In this paper, we present a real time algorithm for extracting a cardiac-respiratory trigger signal using only one, adequately placed, ECG sensor. First, an off-line calculation phase, based on wavelet decomposition, is run to compute an optimal QRS filter. This filter is used, afterwards, to accomplish R peak detection, while a low pass filtering process allows the retrieval of the respiration cycle. The algorithm's synchronization capabilities were assessed during mice cardiac MRI sessions employing three different imaging sequences, and three specific wavelet functions. The prominent image enhancement gave a good proof of correct triggering. QRS detection was almost flawless for all signals. As for the respiration cycle retrieval it was evaluated on contaminated simulated signals, which were artificially modulated to imitate respiration. The results were quite satisfactory.