All-in-One Cardiac MRI: Unified Non-Contrast-enhanced and Contrast-enhanced Imaging for a Continuous-Acquisition...

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Medical Physics

Background:

• Cardiac MRI traditionally requires ECG gating and breath-holding, limiting its accessibility and increasing scan times.
• Integrating non-contrast-enhanced and contrast-enhanced imaging in a single scan can streamline the cardiac MRI workflow.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate a novel continuous-acquisition cardiac MRI method using 3D multitasking reconstruction.
• To assess the feasibility of a 20-minute, free-breathing, non-ECG-gated scan for multiparametric cardiac MRI.

Main Methods:

• Development of a 3D stack-of-stars T2-prepared FLASH sequence with a 3D multitasking reconstruction framework.
• Joint reconstruction of coregistered precontrast and postcontrast images for multiparametric mapping.
• Prospective study in 10 healthy volunteers and 4 pigs, with validation in a digital phantom.

Main Results:

• High correlation of multitasking T1 and T2 measurements with 2D reference methods in phantom studies (R² > 0.99 and R² > 0.960, respectively).
• In vivo, multitasking showed significantly higher myocardial T1 and T2 values compared to MOLLI and T2-prep FLASH, respectively (P < .001).
• No significant difference in extracellular volume (ECV) values between multitasking and MOLLI (P = .52). The method accurately depicted ischemic injury in pigs.

Conclusions:

• The novel 3D multitasking cardiac MRI method enables a comprehensive, 20-minute, automated examination.
• This approach eliminates the need for ECG gating and breath-holding.
• It provides simultaneous measurements of cardiac function, T1, T2, ECV, and late gadolinium enhancement.