Development of a Hybrid MR-US System for the Assessment of Cardiac Function During Free Breathing

W. B. Buchenberg¹, S. Gruhlke¹, J. Maclaren¹, M. Markl², A. Bongers³, J. Jenne³, M. Zaitsev¹, B. Jung¹

The aim of this work was to establish a hybrid MR-ultrasound (US) system to be used for respiratory gating in cardiac imaging on a 1.5T system, and to perform initial In Vitro and in vivo measurements as a first test of the developed procedures. Since the ultrasound system operates independently from the MR acquisitions, the update rate of the respiratory position can be significantly improved in Cine imaging compared to the standard navigator technique. This advantage was exploited by including one respiratory update per cardiac phase instead of a conventional update rate per heartbeat.