BACKGROUND Understanding variation in the normal electric activity of the heart, assessed by the ECG, may provide a starting point for studies of susceptibility to serious arrhythmias such as sudden cardiac death during myocardial infarction or drug therapy. Recent genetic association studies of one ECG trait, the QT interval, have identified common variation in European-descent populations, bu...

PURPOSES Regional myocardial functional parameters were assessed by ECG-gated myocardial SPECT analysis in normal subjects and ischemic heart diseases. METHODS Normal subjects (13 male and 10 female) and 51 patients with chronic ischemic heart disease underwent ECG-gated myocardial SPECT. A dose of 740 MBq of 99mTc-MIBI was injected at rest, and gated SPECT was performed 60 min later. Wall mo...

Methods Perfusion maps are generated by pixel-wise comparison of T1 maps from slice-selective and global inversion recoveries. T1 was quantified using ECG-gated LookLocker approach [3], with 4 lines of k-space acquired every heartbeat to speed up acquisition by approximately four times compared with previous approaches (eg. [2],[3]). A data logger (CED) was used to record ECG, RF and respiratio...

Background Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) is affected by both cardiac and respiratory motion. While ECG-gated imaging within a breath hold is often the method of choice to limit motion-related artifacts, free-breathing methods are favorable in patients with limited breath hold capability. Free-breathing approaches require either rapid singleshot scans to reduce respiratory motion arti...

BACKGROUND We investigated the applicability and image quality of contrast-enhanced coronary artery visualization by multislice spiral CT using retrospective ECG gating. METHODS AND RESULTS Twenty-five patients in sinus rhythm (significant coronary artery stenoses ruled out by invasive angiography) were studied with a multislice spiral CT (Siemens SOMATOM Volume Zoom). In inspiration (mean br...

The 3-D reconstruction of cardiac vasculature using C-arm CT is an active and challenging field of research. In interventional environments patients often do have arrhythmic heart signals or cannot hold breath during the complete data acquisition. This important group of patients cannot be reconstructed with current approaches that do strongly depend on a high degree of cardiac motion periodici...

PURPOSE To develop and evaluate a novel two-dimensional self-gated imaging technique for free-breathing cardiac cine MRI that is free of motion-detection overhead and requires minimal planning for motion tracking. METHODS Motion along the readout direction was extracted solely from normal Cartesian imaging readouts near ky  = 0. During imaging, the readouts below a certain |ky | threshold wer...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have established a correlation between coronary artery calcification (CAC) measured by ECG-gated chest computed tomography (CT) and cardiovascular disease. Recent reports which included asymptomatic patients suggest that CAC measured on non-ECG gated CT is similarly associated with cardiovascular risk. This study investigates the correlation between the Framingham Ri...

Seven dogs were evaluated with prospective ECG-gated computerized transmission tomography (CTT) to analyze left ventricular (LV) wall thickness and cross-sectional chamber area after acute occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD). ECG-gated CTT scanning during i.v. administration of contrast material was performed over the mid-left ventricle at rest, after acute occlusion...