INTRODUCTION Free-breathing coronary MRA (CMRA) typically uses a diaphragm navigator (NAV) for respiratory motion suppression, which is an indirect measure of the respiration-induced cardiac motion (1, 2). Slice tracking (3, 4) can be used to widen the acceptance window to improve navigator efficiency, but relies on a linear motion model to derive heart displacement. A linear correction factor ...

Cardiac muscle contraction, triggered by the action potential, is mediated by the release of Ca(2+) from the sarcoplasmic reticulum through ryanodine receptor (RyR)2 channels. In situ, RyR2 gating is modulated by numerous physiological and pharmacological agents, and altered RyR2 function underlies the occurrence of arrhythmias in both inherited and acquired diseases. To understand fully the me...

Background Coronary arterial wall imaging is a promising non-invasive tool for quantitative assessment of arterial remodeling. Conventional techniques mandate imaging during cardiac rest period as well as nulling the blood signal inside the arterial lumen in order to generate an appropriate lumen-wall contrast. These constraints limited the use of coronary wall imaging. Recently, phase-sensitiv...

The aim of this study was to develop a novel technique for acquiring 3-dimensional (3D) coronary CINE magnetic resonance images with both water and fat visualization during free breathing and without external respiratory or cardiac gating. The implemented multi-echo hybrid 3D radial balanced Steady-State Free Precession (SSFP) sequence has an efficient data acquisition and is robust against mot...

PURPOSE Image-guided cardiac interventions involve the use of fluoroscopic images to guide the insertion and movement of interventional devices. Cardiorespiratory gating can be useful for 3D reconstruction from multiple x-ray views and for reducing misalignments between 3D anatomical models overlaid onto fluoroscopy. METHODS The authors propose a novel and potentially clinically useful retros...

K(+) channels control transmembrane action potentials by gating open or closed in response to external stimuli. Inactivation gating, involving a conformational change at the K(+) selectivity filter, has recently been recognized as a major K(+) channel regulatory mechanism. In the K(+) channel hERG, inactivation controls the length of the human cardiac action potential. Mutations impairing hERG ...

ECG-gated cardiac MRI in the mouse is hindered by many technical difficulties in ECG signal recording inside static and variable high magnetic scanner fields. The present study proposes an alternative robust method of acquiring auto-gated cine images in mouse heart. In our approach, a motion synchronization signal is extracted from the echo peak MR signal of a nontriggered radial acquisition. T...

A respiratory and cardiac self-gated free-breathing three-dimensional cine steady-state free precession imaging method using multiecho hybrid radial sampling is presented. Cartesian mapping of the k-space center along the slice encoding direction provides intensity-weighted position information, from which both respiratory and cardiac motions are derived. With in plan radial sampling acquired a...

The voltage-gated Na channel isoform 1.5 (NaV1.5) is the pore forming α-subunit of the voltage-gated cardiac Na channel, which is responsible for the initiation and propagation of cardiac action potentials. Mutations in the SCN5A gene encoding NaV1.5 have been linked to changes in the Na current leading to a variety of arrhythmogenic phenotypes, and alterations in the NaV1.5 expression level, N...