Abstract #1228

Assessment of Velopharyngeal Function with Multi-Planar High-Resolution Real-Time Spiral Dynamic MRI

Xue Feng¹, Josh Inouye², Silvia Blemker¹, Kant Lin³, Kathleen Borowitz³, Talissa A. Altes⁴, Tracy Kovach³, Walid El-Nahal³, Katie Pelland², Craig H. Meyer¹,⁴

¹Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States; ²Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States; ³Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States; ⁴Radiology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States

Velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) is commonly seen in children who have had a cleft palate repair. Current clinical methods for visualizing VPI include nasal endoscopy and multi-planar video fluoroscopy, which suffer from poor patient tolerance and/or radiation exposure. Static MRI of the velum before and after surgery has been performed for the evaluation of occult submucous cleft palate and velum muscle modeling. Dynamic MRI during speech has also been developed with a relatively high temporal resolution to capture the movements of the tongue and velum. In our study, we focus on the velum movements and aim to simultaneously acquire two slices of the velum with sagittal and oblique coronal views with high spatial (1.2x1.2 mm2) and temporal (21 fps) resolution to get sufficient dynamic information for VPI evaluation and modeling using a real-time spiral SSFP sequence and a combined spatial and temporal parallel reconstruction method with off-resonance correction.