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Right coronary artery flow velocity and volume assessment with spiral K ‐space sampled breathhold velocity‐encoded MRI at 3 tesla: Accuracy and reproducibility
Author(s) -
Brandts Anne,
Roes Stijntje D.,
Doornbos Joost,
Weiss Robert G.,
de Roos Albert,
Stuber Matthias,
Westenberg Jos J.M.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of magnetic resonance imaging
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.563
H-Index - 160
eISSN - 1522-2586
pISSN - 1053-1807
DOI - 10.1002/jmri.22144
Subject(s) - reproducibility , medicine , spiral (railway) , imaging phantom , nuclear medicine , flow velocity , volumetric flow rate , sampling (signal processing) , biomedical engineering , mathematics , physics , statistics , optics , quantum mechanics , detector , mathematical analysis , relaxation (psychology)
Abstract Purpose: To evaluate accuracy and reproducibility of flow velocity and volume measurements in a phantom and in human coronary arteries using breathhold velocity‐encoded (VE) MRI with spiral k ‐space sampling at 3 Tesla. Materials and Methods: Flow velocity assessment was performed using VE MRI with spiral k ‐space sampling. Accuracy of VE MRI was tested in vitro at five constant flow rates. Reproducibility was investigated in 19 healthy subjects (mean age 25.4 ± 1.2 years, 11 men) by repeated acquisition in the right coronary artery (RCA). Results: MRI‐measured flow rates correlated strongly with volumetric collection (Pearson correlation r = 0.99; P < 0.01). Due to limited sample resolution, VE MRI overestimated the flow rate by 47% on average when nonconstricted region‐of‐interest segmentation was used. Using constricted region‐of‐interest segmentation with lumen size equal to ground‐truth luminal size, less than 13% error in flow rate was found. In vivo RCA flow velocity assessment was successful in 82% of the applied studies. High interscan, intra‐ and inter‐observer agreement was found for almost all indices describing coronary flow velocity. Reproducibility for repeated acquisitions varied by less than 16% for peak velocity values and by less than 24% for flow volumes. Conclusion: 3T breathhold VE MRI with spiral k ‐space sampling enables accurate and reproducible assessment of RCA flow velocity. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2010;31:1215–1223. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.