Real-Time Color-Flow Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Congenital Heart Disease

Abstract: Echocardiography is widely used for the diagnosis of congenital heart disease (CHD), although it has limitations. Conventional MRI can overcome some of those limitations, however, it is time consuming and typically requires breath-holding and cardiac gating. We developed a real-time color-flow MRI system, which provides color-coded blood flow information in addition to anatomical imaging. Twelve patients with diagnosis of CHD were studied. In all cases, real-time color flow MRI was able to determine the presence, location and direction of flow in atrial and ventricular septal defects as well as extra-cardiac flow abnormalities. This is a promising tool for the rapid assessment of CHD. Background: A comprehensive cardiac MRI exam should rapidly detect flow abnormalities in CHD. Echocardiography is a widely used method for the assessment of CHD, using color Doppler to visualize abnormal flow (1). We developed a real-time interactive color-flow MRI system analogous to echocardiography, which allows flexibility of imaging plane, velocity direction, velocity range, and is not limited by acoustic window(2). Our objective was to evaluate real-time color-flow MRI in patients with CHD. Methods: Twelve patients with a diagnosis of CHD by echocardiography underwent real-time cardiac MRI evaluation on a 1.5 T MRI system (40 mT/m, 150 T/m/s) using a 5-inch surface coil. A real-time 2-interleave spiral velocity-sensitive color-flow sequence was used (20-cm FOV, 2.8-mm resolution, 18 f p s) , which does not require breath-holding or cardiac gating (Figure 1)