Three-dimensional magnetic resonance myocardial motion tracking from a single image plane

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular imaging
• Medical physics
• Biomedical engineering

Background:

• Accurate quantification of myocardial motion is crucial for diagnosing cardiac diseases.
• Existing 3D imaging techniques often require longer acquisition times or are limited in motion tracking capabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel tagged magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method for automatic 3D myocardial displacement quantification.
• To enable simultaneous tracking of in-plane and through-plane motion from a single image plane without increasing scan duration.

Main Methods:

• A modified cine spoiled gradient recalled acquisition in the steady state sequence with a complementary spatial modulation of phase (CSPAMM) acquisition.
• Introduction of z-encoding gradients to the slice-selection gradient pulse to encode through-plane motion.
• Postprocessing algorithms to decode data and track 3D displacement of material points in each cine frame.

Main Results:

• The method successfully tracks both in-plane and through-plane myocardial motion simultaneously.
• Validation in phantom and in vivo human studies confirmed the accuracy of the 3D displacement and pathline extraction.
• No increase in image acquisition time was observed compared to conventional 2D tagging.

Conclusions:

• This new 3D tagged MRI technique allows for comprehensive quantification of cardiac motion and strain.
• The simultaneous extraction of in-plane and through-plane motion opens new possibilities for automated analysis in clinical and scientific research.
• This advancement has the potential to significantly enhance the evaluation of cardiac function and disease.