Application of Real Time System on Mouse Cardiovascular MRI

Good quality high resolution mouse cardiovascular MR images are obtained with gating using ECG. The latter is affected by the hostile MR environment. It requires appropriate signal processing and correct QRS detection, but gating software methods are currently limited. Several hardware gating devices have already been proposed, each one was set to a determined MR static field intensity and ECG frequency bandwidth. This study sought to demonstrate the feasibility of digital real-time automatically updated gating method, able to perform high-resolution MR images of mouse hearts and aortic arches for different mouse strains, using different field intensities and ECG bandwidths. The real time acquisition chain consisted of ECG signal detection; digital signal processing and gating signal generation modeled using Simulink (The MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA)