MRI-Guided Electrophysiology Intervention

Spectral Analysis of Tissue Displacement for Cardiac Activation Mapping: Ex Vivo Working Heart and In Vivo Study

Characterizing myocardial activation is of major interest for understanding the underlying mechanism of cardiac arrhythmias. Electromechanical wave imaging (EWI) is an ultrafast ultrasound-based method used to map the propagation of the local contraction triggered by electrical activation of the heart. This study introduces a novel way to characterize cardiac activation based on the time evolution of the instantaneous frequency content of the cardiac tissue displacement curves. The first validation of this method was performed on an ex vivo dataset of 36 acquisitions acquired from two working heart models in paced rhythms. It was shown that the activation mapping described by spectral analysis of interframe displacement is similar to the standard EWI method based on zero-crossing of interframe strain. An average median error of 3.3 ms was found in the ex vivo dataset between the activation maps obtained with the two methods. The feasibility of mapping cardiac activation by EWI was then investigated on two open-chest pigs during sinus and paced rhythms in a pilot trial of cardiac mapping with an intracardiac probe. Seventy-five acquisitions were performed with reasonable stability and analyzed with the novel algorithm to map cardiac contraction propagation in the left ventricle (LV). Sixty-one qualitatively continuous isochrones were successfully computed based on this method. The region of contraction onset was coherently described while pacing in the imaging plane. These findings highlight the potential of implementing EWI acquisition on intracardiac probes and emphasize the benefit of performing short time-frequency analysis of displacement data to characterize cardiac activation in vivo.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Guided Cardiac Interventions

Performing intraoperative cardiovascular procedures inside an MR imaging scanner can potentially provide substantial advantage in clinical outcomes by reducing the risk and increasing the success rate relative to the way such procedures are performed today, in which the primary surgical guidance is provided by X-ray fluoroscopy, by electromagnetically tracked intraoperative devices, and by ultrasound. Both noninvasive and invasive cardiologists are becoming increasingly familiar with the capabilities of MR imaging for providing anatomic and physiologic information that is unequaled by other modalities. As a result, researchers began performing animal (preclinical) interventions in the cardiovascular system in the early 1990s.