Prospective high-resolution respiratory-resolved whole-heart MRI for image-guided cardiovascular interventions

Cardiovascular diseases, including arrhythmias and heart failure, are commonly treated with percutaneous procedures guided by X-ray fluoroscopy. The visualization of the targeted structures can be enhanced using preacquired respiratory-resolved anatomic data (dynamic roadmap), which is displayed as an overlay onto X-ray fluoroscopy images. This article demonstrates how dynamic roadmaps using an affine motion model can be obtained from one respiratory-resolved three-dimensional whole-heart acquisition using the previously introduced Radial Phase Encoding-Phase Ordering with Automatic Window Selection method. Respiratory motion in different regions of the heart was analyzed in 10 volunteers, and it was shown that the use of dynamic roadmaps can reduce misalignment errors from more than 10 down to less than 1.5 mm. Furthermore, the results suggest that reliable motion information can be obtained from highly undersampled images due to the advantageous undersampling properties of the radial phase encoding trajectory. Finally, results of a three-dimensional dynamic roadmap obtained from a patient before catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation treatment are presented. Magn Reson Med, 2012. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.