Gated cardiac imaging using low-field NMR

Suppression of radiofrequency interference in cardiac gated MRI: a simple design

A simple design is proposed to suppress the noise pickup in the ECG leads from RF and gradient pulses during NMR imaging. The ECG signal is passed through a low-pass filter and a common-mode-rejection amplifier to reduce erroneous signal generated by the electrical ground loops. The output is gated through a CMOS switch to blank the preamplifier from the NMR during data acquisition.

Cardiac T1 calculations from MR spin-echo images

Normally, cardiac triggering in MR spin-echo imaging restricts repetition times (TR) to integral values of the cardiac period (TC), and introduces irregularities in TR due to variations in TC. We have investigated how much these restrictions decrease the accuracy and precision of spin-lattice relaxation (T1) values of the myocardium calculated from two cardiac-triggered spin-echo images. By introducing additional excitation pulses, TR can effectively be reduced to a fractional value of TC and considerable improvement in T1 precision is possible. For TC = 800 ms, the improvement in T1 precision is 30% when two spin-echo images of TR = 1/2 X TC and TR = 2 X TC are used to calculate T1 instead of two images with TR = TC and TR = 2 X TC. The irregularities in TR decrease both T1 precision and accuracy. Irregularities of the order of 15% in a mean TR of 800 ms produce a fourfold decrease in precision. Since irregularities in TC easily exceed 15%, MRI data should be acquired when individual TR values are approximately within +/- 15% of the subject's mean TC.