Super-fast MRI Scan Technology for heart failure diagnosis

ABOUT

Heart Failure a term used to describe the condition in which heart fails to pump blood properly.

Our body cells require oxygen and nutrition to function properly. When the needs are not met a person faces fatigue, shortness of breath which makes it difficult to do daily activities.

TYPES OF HEART FAILURES:

Left Sided Heart failure: In this the heart is unable to pump enough oxygenated blood from your lungs to the rest of your body, or there’s a higher pressure inside the heart because it’s stiffer.

Diastolic Heart failure: In this type of heart failure, the muscle of a person’s left ventricle stiffens and can no longer relax properly. This prevents the heart from filling with enough oxygenated blood from your lungs to pump to the rest of your body.

Systolic Heart Failure: In this condition, the muscle of a person’s left ventricle becomes weakened and can no longer contract properly. As a result, the heart does not pump with enough force to push oxygenated blood through the body successfully.

Right Sided Heart Failure: In this the person’s right ventricle can’t pump enough blood from the heart to be oxygenated by the lungs. As a result, the blood backs up in veins.

DETECTION OF HEART FAILURE

MRI scans are done to monitor the heart for potential conditions such as heart failure. It takes high resolution images and can accurately produce the measurements of heart which can be used to detect anomalies in heart.

One of the disadvantages of MRI scans is that the process takes minimum of 20 minutes which can be quite a long period for patients.

SOLUTION

To address this problem scientists found a new method to monitor the peak velocity of blood flow in heart accurately and precisely.

The solution uses kat-ARC and variable signal averaging.

kat-ARC is a spatiotemporal-correlation-based auto calibrating parallel imaging method and was used for accelerating 4D flow. The acquisition and reconstruction were optimized for high acceleration. The data was collected with a variable density random k-t sampling scheme to improve overall reconstruction accuracy and reduce coherent artifacts.

Variable signal averaging is used to improve scan efficiency. A radial golden angle view order was used to minimize the adverse effects caused by residual motion artifacts.

By using this method, the time required for completing the process reduces to 8 minutes that is lower than half the original time required.

CONCLUSION:

The new method helps to reduce the time required for MRI scans which can help to increase number of MRI’s done in a single day. Patient’s discomfort is shortened as the time being taken is reducing. This method can help to reduce the chances of anxiety attack experienced by patient caused due to exposure of loud noises produced by MRI equipment for long duration which can affect the images.

With further enhancement in scanning processes we might arrive a time when MRI scans can take only few minutes to produce optimal results thus benefitting hospitals and patients.