Project Details
Description
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death in the United States. The clinical gold standards
to diagnose and guide treatment of patients with CAD are based on invasive catheter-based procedures, such
as x-ray coronary angiography (XCA) for anatomic assessment or fractional flow reserve (FFR) for physiologic
assessment. However, there are costs and risks associated with such invasive procedures. Such concerns are
further highlighted by the fact that large studies have shown nearly two-thirds of patients referred for their initial
elective invasive XCA were found to have no significant stenoses. Thus, better non-invasive diagnostic tools
are needed.
Cardiac MRI (CMR) is the only non-invasive imaging modality that provides a comprehensive assessment of
CAD in a single examination, including an assessment of myocardial perfusion, cardiac function and viability,
as well as angiographic evaluation of stenoses, without requiring ionizing radiation. These properties also allow
for repeat testing as may be clinically indicated. However, despite its great potential to serve as the non-
invasive gatekeeper for costly invasive procedures, lengthy examination times have prevented CMR from
clinical translation. Although several accelerated imaging techniques have been proposed, these still require
trade-offs between coverage, resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. In this proposal, we will develop and validate
novel acquisition and reconstruction strategies to enable a highly accelerated high-resolution whole heart CMR
exam for comprehensive CAD assessment in under 10 minutes. We will develop fast and low specific
absorption rate outer volume suppression modules to reduce the source of aliasing artifacts from the chest and
the back. This will enable higher rates for simultaneous multi-slice imaging in perfusion and cine CMR,
improving coverage substantially with minimal noise amplification. For coronary MRI and viability imaging,
simultaneous multi-slab imaging will be introduced to CMR, facilitating high isotropic resolution acquisitions
with fast coverage. These acquisitions will be supplemented with regularized leakage-blocking and patient-
specific machine learning reconstructions for further artifact and noise removal. Finally, we will implement and
validate the proposed rapid comprehensive CMR exam in a cohort of suspected CAD patients, comparing our
approach with conventional clinical CMR for the assessment of function, perfusion, and viability, and with
invasive XCA for the assessment of coronary stenosis. Successful completion of this project has the potential
to transform CMR into a leading rapid non-invasive tool for safe and accurate diagnosis of CAD, improving the
healthcare of several million patients with chest pain and other CAD symptoms annually.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 5/26/20 → 4/30/24 |
Funding
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: $504,903.00
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: $488,877.00
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: $487,354.00
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: $459,378.00
Fingerprint
Explore the research topics touched on by this project. These labels are generated based on the underlying awards/grants. Together they form a unique fingerprint.