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Cardiac and respiratory motion extraction for MRI using pilot tone–a patient study

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Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the cardiac and respiratory signals extracted from Pilot Tone (PT) in patients clinically referred for cardiovascular MRI. Twenty-three patients were scanned under free-breathing conditions using a balanced steady-state free-precession real-time (RT) cine sequence on a 1.5T scanner. The PT signal was generated by a built-in PT transmitter integrated within the body array coil, and retrospectively processed to extract respiratory and cardiac signals. For comparison, ECG and BioMatrix (BM) respiratory sensor signals were also synchronously recorded. To assess the performances of PT, ECG, and BM, cardiac and respiratory signals extracted from the RT cine images were used as the ground truth. The respiratory motion extracted from PT correlated positively with the image-derived respiratory signal in all cases and showed a stronger correlation (absolute coefficient: 0.95 ± 0.09) than BM (0.72 ± 0.24). For the cardiac signal, PT trigger jitter (standard deviation of PT trigger locations relative to ECG triggers) ranged from 6.6 to 83.3 ms, with a median of 21.8 ms. The mean absolute difference between the PT and corresponding ECG cardiac cycle duration was less than 5% of the average ECG RR interval for 21 out of 23 patients. We did not observe a significant linear dependence (p > 0.28) of PT delay and PT jitter on the patients’ BMI or cardiac cycle duration. This study demonstrates the potential of PT to monitor both respiratory and cardiac motion in patients clinically referred for cardiovascular MRI.

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Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon requests.

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Funding

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health (Grant numbers R01HL135489 and R01HL151697).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, US

    Chong Chen & Rizwan Ahmad

  2. Davis Heart & Lung Research Institute, The Ohio State University, Columbus, US

    Yingmin Liu, Orlando P. Simonetti & Matthew Tong

  3. Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc, Columbus, US

    Ning Jin

  4. Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Erlangen, Germany

    Mario Bacher & Peter Speier

Authors
  1. Chong Chen
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  2. Yingmin Liu
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  3. Orlando P. Simonetti
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  4. Matthew Tong
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  5. Ning Jin
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  6. Mario Bacher
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  7. Peter Speier
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  8. Rizwan Ahmad
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Contributions

RA and CC conceived of the study, designed data processing strategy, and drafted the manuscript. PS, NJ, and YL were involved in sequence programming. RA, YL, and CC were involved in the image reconstruction. PS, NJ, RA, OPS, MT and CC were involved in the processing and interpretation of the data. MT was involved in patient recruitment. All authors were involved in the editing of the manuscript. The authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chong Chen.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

Ning Jin, Mario Bacher and Peter Speier are employees of Siemens Healthcare. The other authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethics approval

The data were collected at The Ohio State University with the ethical approval for recruitment and consent given by an Internal Review Board (2019H0076).

Consent to participate

Written informed consent was obtained from the patients.

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Not applicable.

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Electronic Supplementary Material

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Supplementary Material 1: Figure S1

. The dependence of PT delay and PT jitter on the patients’ BMI/cardiac cycle duration, where patient #21 (red star) is excluded due to high arrhythmic load and weak cardiac contraction. No significant linear relationship is observed since the correlation coefficient is not significantly (p > 0.28) different from zero. The red dashed curve is the confidence bounds with 95% confidence

Supplementary Material 2: Figure S2

. The bivariate tiled histograms of PT delay and ECG cardiac cycle duration. The bin colors represent the number of data points inside the bin with darker blue indicating smaller values. Note the color map is scaled differently across patients to improve visualization. The mean and standard deviation of PT delay are shown in the top left corner. For a specific patient, there is no significant dependence of PT delay on the ECG RR interval

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Chen, C., Liu, Y., Simonetti, O.P. et al. Cardiac and respiratory motion extraction for MRI using pilot tone–a patient study. Int J Cardiovasc Imaging 40, 93–105 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-023-02966-z

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