Background: Turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), assessed by 4-dimensional (4D) flow magnetic resonance imaging, is a measure of energy loss in disturbed flow as it occurs, for instance, in aortic stenosis (AS). This work investigates the additional information provided by quantifying TKE for the assessment of AS severity in comparison to clinical echocardiographic measures.
Methods And Results: Fifty-one patients with AS (67±15 years, 20 female) and 10 healthy age-matched controls (69±5 years, 5 female) were prospectively enrolled to undergo multipoint 4D flow magnetic resonance imaging.
Today, the functional and risk assessment of stenosed arteries is mostly based on ultrasound Doppler blood flow velocity measurements or catheter pressure measurements, which rely on several assumptions. Alternatively, blood velocity including turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) may be measured using MRI. The aim of the present study is to validate a TKE-based approach that relies on the fact that turbulence production is dominated by the flow's shear to determine the total irreversible energy loss from MRI scans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To develop accelerated 4D flow MRI by exploiting low-rank matrix structure and Hadamard sparsity.
Theory And Methods: 4D flow MRI data can be represented as the sum of a low-rank and a sparse component. To optimize the sparse representation of the data, it is proposed to incorporate a Hadamard transform of the velocity-encoding segments.
Purpose: To investigate the limits of phase contrast MRI (PC-MRI)-based measurements of viscous losses and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) pertaining to spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and non-Gaussian intravoxel velocity distributions.
Theory And Methods: High-resolution particle tracking velocimetry data obtained in a realistic aortic phantom with stenotic flow were used to simulate PC-MRI measurements at different resolutions and noise levels. Laminar viscous losses were computed using the spatial gradients of the mean velocity vector field, and TKE levels were derived based on the intravoxel phase dispersion of flow-sensitized PC-MRI measurements.
Purpose: To propose and validate a g-factor formalism for k-t SENSE, k-t PCA and related k-t methods for assessing SNR and temporal fidelity.
Methods: An analytical gxf -factor formulation in the spatiotemporal frequency domain is derived, enabling assessment of noise and depiction fidelity in both the spatial and frequency domain. Using pseudoreplica analysis of cardiac cine data the gxf -factor description is validated and example data are used to analyze the performance of k-t methods for various parameter settings.
Purpose: The aim of this work is to derive a theoretical framework for quantitative noise and temporal fidelity analysis of time-resolved k-space-based parallel imaging methods.
Theory: An analytical formalism of noise distribution is derived extending the existing g-factor formulation for nontime-resolved generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisition (GRAPPA) to time-resolved k-space-based methods. The noise analysis considers temporal noise correlations and is further accompanied by a temporal filtering analysis.
Purpose: To measure arterial, venous, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) velocities simultaneously by using Bayesian multipoint velocity-encoded magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and to compare interacquisition reproducibility relative to that of standard phase-contrast MR imaging for sequential measurements of arterial, venous, and CSF velocities.
Materials And Methods: This study was approved by the local ethics committee, and informed consent was obtained from all subjects. Simultaneous measurement of blood and CSF flow was performed at the C1-C2 level in 10 healthy subjects (mean age, 24.
Purpose: To validate Bayesian multipoint MR velocity encoding against particle tracking velocimetry for measuring velocity vector fields and fluctuating velocities in a realistic aortic model.
Methods: An elastic cast of a human aortic arch equipped with an 80 or 64% stenotic section was driven by a pulsatile pump. Peak velocities and peak turbulent kinetic energies of more than 3 m/s and 1000 J/m(3) could be generated.
An approach to efficiently measure three-dimensional velocity vector fields and turbulent kinetic energy of blood flow is presented. Multipoint phase-contrast imaging is used in combination with Bayesian analysis to map both mean and fluctuating velocities over a large dynamic range and for practically relevant signal-to-noise ratios. It is demonstrated that the approach permits significant spatiotemporal undersampling to allow for clinically acceptable scan times.
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