title: High time-resolved cardiac functional imaging using temporal regularization for small animal on a clinical 3T scanner.
abstract: Accurate assessment of mice cardiac function with magnetic resonance imaging is essential for longitudinal studies and for drug development related to cardiovascular diseases. Whereas dedicated small animal MR scanners are not readily available, it would be a great advantage to be able to perform cardiac assessment on clinical systems, in particular, in the context of translational research. However, mouse imaging remains challenging since it requires both high spatial and temporal resolutions, while gradient performances of clinical scanners often limit the reachable parameters. In this study, we propose a new cine sequence, named "interleaved cine," which combines two repetitions of a standard cine sequence shifted in time in order to reach resolution parameters compatible with mice imaging. More precisely, this sequence allows temporal resolution to be reduced to 6.8 ms instead of 13.5 ms initially imposed by the system's hardware. We also propose a two-step denoising algorithm to suppress some artifacts inherent to the new interleaved cine thus allowing an efficient enhancement of the image quality. In particular, we model and suppress the periodic intensity pattern and further denoise the sequence by soft thresholding of the temporal Fourier coefficients. This sequence was successfully validated with mass and function measurements on relevant mice models of cardiovascular diseases.
authors: Division of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine, Foundation for Medical Researchers, Geneva University Hospital, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. benedicte.delattre@gmail.com
authors: Bénédicte M A
authors: BM
authors: Delattre
authors: Dimitri
authors: D
authors: Van De Ville
authors: Vincent
authors: V
authors: Braunersreuther
authors: Corinne
authors: C
authors: Pellieux
authors: Jean-Noël
authors: JN
authors: Hyacinthe
authors: René
authors: R
authors: Lerch
authors: François
authors: F
authors: Mach
authors: Jean-Paul
authors: JP
authors: Vallée
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D017379:Hypertrophy, Left Ventricular / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D019028:Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Cine / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods* / Q000662:veterinary*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity