Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Congenital heart disease (CHD) affects roughly 2 million people in the US and remains
responsible for twice as many years of life lost as all of childhood cancer combined (1). To reduce this
mortality burden, clinicians have shifted their focus towards monitoring cardiovascular function over time,
after initial surgeries, in order to make decisions about when and how to intervene. Cardiac magnetic
resonance (CMR) imaging has become the gold standard technique to fill this role due to its excellent
accuracy and reproducibility and lack of ionizing radiation.
Advanced CMR techniques can now quantify three dimensional flow and motion of both the
myocardium and the blood. These techniques offer unlimited potential for improving our ability to
diagnose and treat patients with CHD. However, advanced CMR techniques currently require long
acquisition times which limit their feasibility in the clinic. Our overall goal is to make these advanced
CMR techniques clinically feasible through dramatically reducing the time required to acquire the image
data. We propose a new CMR system, which we call videogame interface for diaphragm location
(VIDLoc), that can reduce 60 minute scans to 22 minutes.
VIDLoc works by advising children how to alter their breathing patterns in real-time, during CMR,
in order to dramatically reduce the total time required to acquire CMR data. The concept is simple: the
heart moves up and down on the diaphragm as children breathe. Thus, imaging can only be performed
when the diaphragm is within a narrow region called the “acceptance window”. Since children breathe
very erratically, the amount of time they spend in the acceptance window is often as low as 20% (thus
imaging can only be performed 1/5th of the time). VIDLoc overcomes this by taking a picture of the child’s
diaphragm in real-time and using this to generate a videogame. The videogame will show a car driving
on a road where the car’s location relative to the road will represent the diaphragm location relative to
the acceptance window. VIDLoc will provide instructions to children to guide their diaphragm (or car) to
be within the acceptance window (or road) (Fig 1), where the heart can then be imaged. We hypothesize
that using VIDLoc will optimize the amount of time spent in the acceptance window and therefore reduce
CMR acquisition times.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 4/20/15 → 4/19/17 |
Funding
- National Heart Lung and Blood Institute: $31,368.00
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