Free-Breathing 3D Imaging of Right Ventricular Structure and Function Using Respiratory and Cardiac Self-Gated Cine MRI

Providing a movie of the beating heart in a single prescribed plane, cine MRI has been widely used in clinical cardiac diagnosis, especially in the left ventricle (LV). Right ventricular (RV) morphology and function are also important for the diagnosis of cardiopulmonary diseases and serve as predictors for the long term outcome. The purpose of this study is to develop a self-gated free-breathing 3D imaging method for RV quantification and to evaluate its performance by comparing it with breath-hold 2D cine imaging in 7 healthy volunteers. Compared with 2D, the 3D RV functional measurements show a reduction of RV end-diastole volume (RVEDV) by 10%, increase of RV end-systole volume (RVESV) by 1.8%, reduction of RV systole volume (RVSV) by 21%, and reduction of RV ejection fraction (RVEF) by 12%. High correlations between the two techniques were found (RVEDV: 0.94; RVESV: 0.85; RVSV: 0.95; and RVEF: 0.89). Compared with 2D, the 3D image quality measurements show a small reduction in blood SNR, myocardium-blood CNR, myocardium contrast, and image sharpness. In conclusion, the proposed self-gated free-breathing 3D cardiac cine imaging technique provides comparable image quality and correlated functional measurements to those acquired with the multiple breath-hold 2D technique in RV.