Project Details
Projekt
PET/MR for the multimodal diagnostics of myocardial perfusion: validation and synergies
Subject Area
Medical Physics, Biomedical Technology
Nuclear Medicine, Radiotherapy, Radiobiology
Nuclear Medicine, Radiotherapy, Radiobiology
Term
from 2014 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 257567879
Ischemic heart disease is the most common cause of death in western countries. Non-invasively diagnosis can be performed using nuclear medicine techniques like Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT) or Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Dynamic contrast enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance imaging also allows for the diagnosis and has demonstrated a high potential for clinical routine use. Recently, also quantitative perfusion measurements gained a lot of interest. With respect to nuclear medicine examinations, MRI on the one hand benefits from the absence of ionizing radiation and the significantly higher spatial resolution. On the other hand MRI still suffers from some major disadvantages like the rather small anatomic coverage of only 3 to 4 slices within each RR-interval or the suboptimal validation. Consequently, in this project new techniques will be developed allowing for highly resolved measurements of the first pass perfusion with whole heart coverage. The techniques will be validated using an integrated PET/MR-system. Besides the development and validation works the potential of a synergetic usage of simultaneously acquired PET and MRI data for myocardial tissue characterization will be explored. The new imaging techniques are intended to provide highly resolved images, cover the whole myocardium and allow for the quantitative determination of the myocardial perfusion. In order to achieve whole heart coverage simultaneous multi-slice imaging (MS-CAIPIRINHA) will be utilized. Incorporating a radial k-space trajectory, additionally an imaging method will be developed that allows estimating the time curves of the contrast agent concentration within the blood pools and the myocardium from one single scan. A second bolus injection as known from the prebolus technique will thus be no longer required for perfusion quantification. Implemented on an integrated PET/MR system, the newly developed imaging techniques will be validated and the expected advantages of MS-CAIPIRINHA in terms of accurate myocardial perfusion quantification will be evaluated utilizing the simultaneously acquired PET data. The achieved full anatomical coverage in MR perfusion imaging allows an improved comparability with the results of the quantitative PET examination. Moreover, it will be investigated, to what extent the use of a radial k-space trajectory systematically improves the contrast agent quantification. Considering the difference in the distribution kinetics for the MRI contrast agent and the PET tracer, a simultaneously acquired PET/MR dataset is expected to deliver a combined set of quantitative information on tissue functionality that exceeds the information retrievable by individual MRI or PET examinations. A goal of this project thus will be to evaluate the synergetic potential of a simultaneous whole heart PET/MR examination regarding a multiparametric myocardial tissue characterization.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
