Introduction:Myocardial 18F-FDG uptake is highly variable in oncologic whole body 18F-FDG PET/CT studies, ranging from quite intense to minimal distribution. Intense or heterogeneous myocardial 18F-FDG uptake is undesirable as it may interfere with the visual or quantitative evaluation of tumoral invasion and metastases in pericardium, myocardiu...

Eddy current effects can severely degrade image quality when using balanced steady-state free precession imaging with rapidly varying phase encode ordering schemes, which have common use in cardiac cine MRI. In this work, we explore and characterize a previouslyproposed technique, through-slice dephasing, as the sole technique for eddy current artifact removal. We demonstrate that artifacts var...

We propose a general workflow to numerically estimate the spread of electrical excitation in the patients' hearts. To this end, a semi-automatic segmentation pipeline for extracting the volume conductor model of structurally normal hearts is presented. The cardiac electrical source imaging technique aims to provide information about the spread of electrical excitation in order to assist the car...

This PRIME project focused on the imaging of cardiac mouse myocytes using a super-resolution imaging technique, called dSTORM (direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy). Using this technique, fixed cardiac cells isolated from caveolin-3 knockout and wild type animals were immunostained, imaged, and analyzed in order to discern differences in Ryanodine Receptor between the two. These ...

Background Cine imaging is the core technique for cardiac MRI studies. Often times, it is also essential to have information identifying fat signal in the heart to characterize masses, detect fatty infiltration and ARVD, discern fat from fibrosis in LGE imaging, and improve visualization of the pericardium. However, such information traditionally requires additional scans that obtain fat-suppre...

Background In vivo Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging (cDTI) remains extremely challenging due to a mixture of cardiac and respiratory motion. In previous work a prospective navigator technique (NAV) has been implemented and compared to breath-hold (BH) acquisitions. Statistically significant differences were found between BH and NAV techniques for helix-angle (HA) values. Further interrogation o...

Background Myocardial phase velocity mapping studies have generally been acquired using Cartesian k-space coverage and respiratory gating [1,2]. Acquisition durations for high temporal resolution studies are therefore long and unpredictable and the use of navigators and prospective cardiac gating results in ‘dead-times’ in the cardiac cycle where imaging cannot be performed. We have developed a...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) represent the leading cause of maternal mortality and morbidity. Knowledge of CVD in women is constantly evolving and data are emerging that female-specific risk factors as complications of pregnancy are conditions associated with an increased risk for the long-term development of CVD. Echocardiography is a safe and effective imaging technique indicated in symptoma...

Introduction: Metallic artifacts due to pacemaker/ implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) leads in CT images can produce artifactual uptake in cardiac SPECT/CT images. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of the metallic artifacts due to pacemaker and ICD leads on myocardial SPECT/CT imaging. Methods: The study included 9 patients wh...

Introduction: Myocardial perfusion SPECTby 99mTc-Sestamibi and 99mTc-Tetrofosmin radiopharmaceuticals usually presents a false significant increase in the radiotracer uptake in the inferior myocardium due to the uptake in organs such as liver, bowel, stomach and biliary system. The present study evaluated a suitable Slit angle for differentiating extra-car...