Magnetic Resonance Arterial Wall Imaging Methods that Compensate for Patient Aperiodic Intrinsic Cardiac, Chest Wall, and Blood Flow-Induced Motions
- Prototype
- Early-stage
- Pre-clinical
- In vivo data available (human)
The technology includes MRI methods, systems, and software for reliably imaging vasculature and vascular wall thickness while compensating for aperiodic intrinsic motion of a patient during respiration. To overcome the loss of the orthogonality due to uncompensated residual motions and after a lapse of time equal to the trigger delay commenced at the cardiac cycle, the system acquires multiple consecutive time-resolved images of the arterial wall. The cine images are processed offline and a wall thickness measurement is produced.
The method improves arterial wall imaging by increasing the success rate of obtaining good and excellent quality images and imaging slice-vessel orthogonality. The method also provides more precise wall measurements and a more distinct difference between healthy subjects and patients.
The methodology and system can be applied to any commercially available MRI scanner.
- early detection of vascular disease,
- research in the field of vascular disease,
- non-invasive assessment of the efficacy of medication and/or lifestyle changes in vascular health status in a particular subject, and
- assessment of the efficacy of new medications or new uses of existing medications to treat vascular disease.
Existing techniques suffer from image degradation due to aperiodic intrinsic cardiac, chest wall motions, or other bulk motion that often cause image blur and reduced wall sharpness. These techniques do not adequately address the time-dependent angular orientation of the arteries, whereby mispositioning of the imaged slice may cause disappearance of the lumen-wall interface altogether.
In the new technology time-resolved arterial wall imaging overcomes the loss of the orthogonality due to uncompensated residual motion.