INTRODUCTION 4D cardiovascular MRI applications typically require prolonged scan times and suffer from artifacts due to physiological motion. Compressed sensing (CS) and its combination with parallel imaging (PI) have recently emerged as valuable tools for accelerating MRI acquisitions by reconstructing images from undersampled k-space data. The required incoherent artifact in CS is usually ach...

Cytosolic calcium concentration in resting cardiac myocytes locally fluctuates as a result of spontaneous microscopic Ca(2+) releases or abruptly rises as a result of an external trigger. These processes, observed as calcium sparks, are fundamental for proper function of cardiac muscle. In this study, we analyze how the characteristics of spontaneous and triggered calcium sparks are related to ...

Segmented cine MRI generally requires breath-holding, which can be problematic for many patients. Navigator echo techniques, particularly successful for free-breathing coronary MRA, are incompatible with the acquisition strategies and SSFP pulse sequences commonly used for cine MRI. The purpose of this work is to introduce a new self-gating technique deriving respiratory gating information dire...

E. Heijman, W. de Graaf, C. Diekmann, A. Nauerth, G. Strijkers, K. Nicolay Biomedical NMR, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands, Bruker BioSpin MRI GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany Introduction In cardiac research in vivo studies of mice are indispensable to gain an improved understanding of cardiovascular disease mechanisms and to develop nov...

PURPOSE Cardiac motion is a dominant source of physiological noise (PN) in myocardial arterial spin labeled (ASL) perfusion imaging. This study investigates the sensitivity to heart rate variation (HRV) of double-gated myocardial ASL compared with the more widely used single-gated method. METHODS Double-gating and single-gating were performed on 10 healthy volunteers (n = 10, 3F/7M; age, 23-3...

Background Recently, 3D CINE phase-contrast MRI (4D Flow) has demonstrated potential for quantitative measurement of blood flow of the cardiovascular systems in the entire thoracic trunk [1]. However, the needs of 4D flow for high resolution, large volume coverage & respiratory gating render very long scan time. This work intended to improve the data acquisition efficiency of free-breathing car...

Block of sodium ionic current by lidocaine is associated with alteration of the gating charge-voltage (Q-V) relationship characterized by a 38% reduction in maximal gating charge (Q(max)) and by the appearance of additional gating charge at negative test potentials. We investigated the molecular basis of the lidocaine-induced reduction in cardiac Na channel-gating charge by sequentially neutral...

Imaging is a noninvasive complement to traditional methods (such as histology) in rodent cardiac studies. Assessments of structure and function are possible with ultrasound, microcomputed tomography (microCT), and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Cardiac imaging in the rodent poses a challenge because of the size of the animal and its rapid heart rate. Each aspect in the process of rodent cardi...