Data from: Three-dimensional self-gated cardiac MR imaging for the evaluation of myocardial infarction in mouse model on a 3T clinical MR system

Purpose: To develop and assess a three-dimensional (3D) self-gated
technique for the evaluation of myocardial infarction (MI) in mouse model
without the use of external electrocardiogram (ECG) trigger and
respiratory motion sensor on a 3T clinical MR system. Methods: A 3D
T1-weighted GRE sequence with stack-of-stars sampling trajectories was
developed and performed on six mice with MIs that were injected with a
gadolinium-based contrast agent at a 3T clinical MR system. Respiratory
and cardiac self-gating signals were derived from the Cartesian mapping of
the k-space center along the partition encoding direction by bandpass
filtering in image domain. The data were then realigned according to the
predetermined self-gating signals for the following image reconstruction.
In order to accelerate the data acquisition, image reconstruction was
based on compressed sensing (CS) theory by exploiting temporal sparsity of
the reconstructed images. In addition, images were also reconstructed from
the same realigned data by conventional regridding method for
demonstrating the advantageous of the proposed reconstruction method.
Furthermore, the accuracy of detecting MI by the proposed method was
assessed using histological analysis as the standard reference. Linear
regression and Bland-Altman analysis were used to assess the agreement
between the proposed method and the histological analysis. Results:
Compared to the conventional regridding method, the proposed CS method
reconstructed images with much less streaking artifact, as well as a
better contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) between the blood and myocardium (4.1
± 2.1 vs. 2.9 ± 1.1, P= 0.031). Linear regression and Bland-Altman
analysis demonstrated that excellent correlation was obtained between
infarct sizes derived from the proposed method and histology analysis.
Conclusion: A 3D T1-weighted self-gating technique for mouse cardiac
imaging was developed, which has potential for accurately evaluating MIs
in mice at 3T clinical MR system without the use of external ECG trigger
and respiratory motion sensor.