A phantom validation of the FastHARP pulse sequence

The FastHARP magnetic resonance imaging pulse sequence, coupled with fast processing, has the potential to measure and display cardiac function in real-time during clinical dobutamine stress tests. In this paper, we present a preliminary validation of the tracking capability of material points using this imaging sequence. Points lying on a mesh embedded in a moving gel phantom are tracked manually using high-resolution images and are simultaneously tracked using HARP tools. The experiment proves that for this particular type of motion actuation, the points tracked in images using the FastHARP sequence followed by fast and automated HARP tracking tools are comparable to results obtained from images acquired in much longer times with very tedious analysis involving manual intervention.