Cardiac Functional Assessment Without ECG Using Physiological Self-Navigation

Christoph Kolbitsch¹, Claudia Prieto¹, Tobias Schaeffter¹

ECG-gated cine MRI provides accurate functional information on the heart, however reliable ECG signals are not always available. We propose a novel framework to assess heart function based on physiological information obtained from MR images without an ECG. A Golden-Angle radial acquisition is used to obtain quantitative cardiac gating signals from blood volume changes in real-time images. This is used for reconstruction of retrospectively gated 2D multi-slice cine images. Finally, information on heart valve closure is used for slice synchronisation. Functional assessment of the left ventricle in five volunteers showed deviations less than 5% compared to standard ECG-gated Cartesian approach.