Respiratory Motion Analysis in Children With MRI

Overview

The purpose of this project is to analyze the respiratory motion process as relevant in cardiac MRI imaging and apply the results for development of improved imaging methods and software correction. To accomplish this, we will develop an imaging protocol for monitoring respiratory motion. The imaging protocol will be limited to less than five minutes of acquisition time so it may be performed as "piggyback" acquisition following clinically prescribed imaging studies on pediatric and adult cardiac MRI patients, but will also be applied to normal healthy volunteers. Hypothesis Characterization of respiratory motion will help improve image quality by allowing optimized scan acquisition and retrospective correction of acquired data.

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used heavily in the research setting but its use is limited in clinical practice, the main reason being artifact (noise) from respiratory and cardiac motion. To counteract these sources of motion, many different applications have been applied. For cardiac motion, ECG (electrocardiogram) gating is widely used, while respiratory motion reduction uses methods of breath holding or respiratory gating techniques. Patients will be recruited based on whether they are a normal healthy volunteer or a patient already receiving a routine cardiac MRI. Normal Healthy Volunteers Patients will be recruited via a flyer posted in various locations at Emory University. The contents of this flyer will adhere strictly to Emory IRB Advertisement guidelines. Subjects will register by contacting Marijn Brunner, PhD, by email or telephone. Patients already scheduled for a routine cardiac MRI The MRI technical specialist will review the laboratory schedule daily. Those who are already scheduled for a routine cardiac MRI will be approached by a study staff member in the Children's MRI Department. The patient will be asked if he/she would wish to enroll in this study. The patient will be requested to sign a consent prior to any study procedures being performed. MRI image data will be collected by the prescribed protocol for respiratory monitoring. All MRI data will be acquired by standard FDA approved imaging methods. The image data will be transferred by network to the Pediatrics Imaging Research Laboratory where they will be stored on a password-protected computer and analyzed.