Data from: Three-dimensional self-gated cardiac MR imaging for the evaluation of myocardial infarction in mouse model on a 3T clinical MR system

Purpose: To develop and assess a three-dimensional (3D) self-gated technique for the evaluation of myocardial infarction (MI) in mouse model without the use of external electrocardiogram (ECG) trigger and respiratory motion sensor on a 3T clinical MR system. Methods: A 3D T1-weighted GRE sequence with stack-of-stars sampling trajectories was developed and performed on six mice with MIs that were injected with a gadolinium-based contrast agent at a 3T clinical MR system. Respiratory and cardiac self-gating signals were derived from the Cartesian mapping of the k-space center along the partition encoding direction by bandpass filtering in image domain. The data were then realigned according to the predetermined self-gating signals for the following image reconstruction. In order to accelerate the data acquisition, image reconstruction was based on compressed sensing (CS) theory by exploiting temporal sparsity of the reconstructed images. In addition, images were also reconstructed from the same realigned data by conventional regridding method for demonstrating the advantageous of the proposed reconstruction method. Furthermore, the accuracy of detecting MI by the proposed method was assessed using histological analysis as the standard reference. Linear regression and Bland-Altman analysis were used to assess the agreement between the proposed method and the histological analysis. Results: Compared to the conventional regridding method, the proposed CS method reconstructed images with much less streaking artifact, as well as a better contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) between the blood and myocardium (4.1 ± 2.1 vs. 2.9 ± 1.1, P= 0.031). Linear regression and Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated that excellent correlation was obtained between infarct sizes derived from the proposed method and histology analysis. Conclusion: A 3D T1-weighted self-gating technique for mouse cardiac imaging was developed, which has potential for accurately evaluating MIs in mice at 3T clinical MR system without the use of external ECG trigger and respiratory motion sensor.Original data setPlease find the original MRI data in the MRI data file, and the histology image in the Histology file. All MRI data (referring to the .dat binary files) was from a 3 T clinical MR system (Tim Trio, Siemens, Erlangen, Germany) without using external ECG trigger and respiratory motion sensor. The data can be loaded, viewed, and analyzed with MATLAB 2013a (Mathworks Inc., Natick, MA, USA). After MR scan, all mice were re-anaesthetized and sacrificed by rapid excision of the heart. The heart was then rinsed in 0.9% NaCl, frozen and manually sectioned into 5-6 short-axis slices with thickness of ~1.5 mm from apex to base. The slices were incubated with 0.1% triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) for 15 minutes, and photographed with a digital camera and prepared for further analysis (referring to the histology image).Data loading codesThe codes that could open/load the .dat files from Siemens MR scanners. You could use the 'demo' codes to load the files for further analysis