Prospective ECG-gated mouse cardiac imaging with a 34-MHz annular array transducer

Prospective imaging with electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiratory gating presents an imaging application that leverages the improved image quality of high-frequency (>20 MHz) annular arrays without the need for rapid mechanical motion. The limitation of prospective imaging is that the object being imaged must have a periodically stable motion. The present study investigated the implementation of prospective imaging with a 34 MHz annular-array scan system to image the mouse heart at high effective frame rates, >200 frames/s (fps). M-mode data for all transmit-to-receive pairs were acquired at a series of spatial locations using ECG and respiratory gating, and the data were then synthetically focused in postprocessing. The pulse-repetition frequency of the M-mode data determined the effective frame rate of the final B-mode image sequence. The hearts of adult mice were prospectively imaged and compared with retrospective data acquired with a commercial ultrasonic biomicroscope (UBM). The annular array data were acquired at an effective frame rate of 500 fps spanning 0.5 s, and the UBM data were acquired at 1000 fps spanning 0.15 s. The resulting images showed that multiple heart cycles could be clearly resolved using prospective imaging and that synthetic focusing improved image resolution and SNR of the right ventricle, interventricular septum, posterior edge of the left ventricle (LV), and papillary muscles of the LV versus fixed-focused imaging and the retrospective imaging of the UBM machine.