Respiratory- and cardiac motion-corrected simultaneous whole-heart PET and dual phase coronary MR angiography

To develop a framework for efficient and simultaneous acquisition of motion-compensated whole-heart coronary MR angiography (CMRA) and left ventricular function by MR and myocardial integrity by PET on a 3T PET-MR system.

An acquisition scheme based on a dual-phase CMRA sequence acquired simultaneously with cardiac PET data has been developed. The framework is integrated with a motion-corrected image reconstruction approach, so that non-rigid respiratory and cardiac deformation fields estimated from MR images are used to correct both the CMRA (respiratory motion correction for each cardiac phase) and the PET data (respiratory and cardiac motion correction). The proposed approach was tested in a cohort of 8 healthy subjects and 6 patients with coronary artery disease. Left ventricular (LV) function estimated from motion-corrected dual-phase CMRA was compared to the gold standard estimated from a stack of 2D CINE images for the healthy subjects. Relative increase of signal in motion-corrected PET images compared to uncorrected images was computed for standard 17-segment polar maps for each patient.

Motion-corrected dual-phase CMRA images allow for visualization of the coronary arteries in both systole and diastole for all healthy subjects and cardiac patients. LV functional indices from healthy subjects result in good agreement with the reference method, underestimating stroke volume by 3.07 ± 3.26 mL and ejection fraction by 0.30 ± 1.01%. Motion correction improved delineation of the myocardium in PET images, resulting in an increased ¹⁸ F-FDG signal of up to 28% in basal segments of the myocardial wall compared to uncorrected images.

The proposed motion-corrected dual-phase CMRA and cardiac PET produces co-registered good quality images in both modalities in a single efficient examination of ~13 min.