Octavia Bane1,
2, Sanjiv J. Shah3, Michael J. Cuttica4, Jeremy
D. Collins1, Senthil Selvaraj5, Christoph Guetter6,
James C. Carr1, Timothy J. Carroll1, 2
1Feinberg
School of Medicine, Radiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United
States; 2Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University,
Evanston, IL, United States; 3Feinberg School of Medicine,
Cardiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States; 4Feinberg
School of Medicine, Pulmonary Care, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL,
United States; 5Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern
University, Chicago, IL, United States; 6Corporate Research,
Siemens Corporation, Princeton, NJ, United States
Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a disease of the pulmonary vasculature, with subtypes pulmonary arterial and pulmonary venous hypertension, usually diagnosed by right-heart catheterization (RHC). We propose a method to measure several cardiopulmonary parameters of interest in PH, non-invasively by MRI. The parameters are subsequently used to calculate pulmonary artery pressure waveforms according to the two element windkessel model . We validated our approach in a study of 8 consecutive patients with suspected PH (mean pulmonary arterial pressure, mPAP>25 mmHg), who underwent RHC, Doppler echocardiography and cardiac MRI. We found no statistically significant difference between RHC and MRI.