Avoiding additional hardware and recovering cardiac information from k-space

Abstract

MRI is considered the gold standard for the imaging of cardiac function and anatomy. In regular cardiac MRI, an external ECG monitor is required in order to synchronize the data acquisition with the motion of the heart. However, this additional hardware increases the examination, preparation and acquisition times. The aim of this proposal is to avoid the necessity of this additional hardware in cardiac MRI examinations by developing an automatic method to recover the cardiac cycle information directly from the MRI data both in breath-hold and free breathing situations. Some different scenarios have been considered and some methods have been proposed with good performances, obtaining errors between 1-4%.