Automatic view planning for cardiac MRI acquisition

Abstract

Conventional cardiac MRI acquisition involves a multi-step approach, requiring a few double-oblique localizers in order to locate the heart and prescribe long- and short-axis views of the heart. This approach is operator-dependent and time-consuming. We propose a new approach to automating and accelerating the acquisition process to improve the clinical workflow. We capture a highly accelerated static 3D full-chest volume through parallel imaging within one breath-hold. The left ventricle is localized and segmented, including left ventricle outflow tract. A number of cardiac landmarks are then detected to anchor the cardiac chambers and calculate standard 2-, 3-, and 4-chamber long-axis views along with a short-axis stack. Learning-based algorithms are applied to anatomy segmentation and anchor detection. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on 173 localizer acquisitions. The entire view planning is fully automatic and takes less than 10 seconds in our experiments. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.