Lei Qin1, Ehud J. Schmidt1, Juan
Santos2, W. Scott Hoge1, Clare Tempany-Afdhal1,
Kim Butts-Pauly3, William G. Stevenson4, Charles L.
Dumoulin5
1Radiology, Harvard Medical
School, Boston, MA, United States; 2Heart Vista, Inc, Palo Alto,
CA; 3Radiology, Stanford University; 4Cardiology,
Harvard Medical School; 5Radiology, Cincinnati Childrens' Hospital
Intra-cardiac imaging coils provided a higher signal-to-noise ratio than surface coils, therefore reducing the scan times. However, intra-cardiac coils suffer more severely from motion artifacts since both the anatomy and the coils are moving during image acquisition. We developed a tetrahedral-shaped active MR-tracking array and integrated it with a modified 3D-MDE sequence to perform prospective motion corrections, so that the entire image could be acquired in a static frame of reference. Experiments on ex-vivo swine hearts demonstrated significant image quality improvements during both in-plane and through-plane motion, with sufficient resolution to detect gaps in left-atrial ablation lesions.
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