4D phase-contrast magnetic resonance cardioangiography (4D PC-MRCA) creation from 4D flow MRI

Abstract

MR angiography (MRA) and phase-contrast MRA (PCMRA) generation methods that facilitate blood flow assessment in the heart and thoracic vessels typically lead to the compression of data from all the timeframes of a cardiac cycle into one 2D or 3D image. This process,however,results in information loss from individual timeframes. We propose a new method for PC-MRA data generation from 4D flow MRI,which uses registration between the timeframes of the 4D acquisition to create a “four-dimensional PC-MR CardioAngiography (4D PCMRCA)” that retains vascular and cardiac blood flow information over the entire cardiac cycle. When evaluated on 10 4D flow MRI datasets,4D PC-MRCA outperformed 3D PC-MRA,especially when cardiac or vessel motion was present. Consequently,the proposed method improves the existing PCMRA generation techniques by effectively utilizing spatial as well as temporal blood flow information on both the heart and thoracic vasculature from 4D flow MR images.