Ahmad awarded $409K NIH R21 grant

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Dr. Rizwan Ahmad, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering (BME), has been awarded a 2-year, $409K, National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 grant for his study titled “Prospective Slice Tracking for Cardiac MRI.” The projects runs from August 15, 2018 – May 31, 2020. This is a collaborative award with PIs/Co-Is from the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine: Drs. Rizwan Ahmad (PI, BME), Orlando Simonetti (MPI, Internal Medicine), Jason Craft (Co-I, Internal Medicine), and Lee Potter (Co-I, Electrical and Computer Engineering). Details of this award are below.

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) provides arguably the most comprehensive evaluation of the cardiovascular system; however, respiratory motion continues to adversely impact CMR, causing artifacts that lead to poor image quality, repeated scans, and decreased throughput, and thus represents a significant obstacle to clinical utility. Prospective compensation of the respiratory motion has been recognized as an attractive alternative to existing gating and image registration. Existing methods use one or more navigator echoes—incompatible with or inefficient for many CMR protocols—to capture the respiratory motion and rely on simple parametric models that are inadequate to describe complex respiratory-induced cardiac motion.  We propose a new framework to prospectively compensate respiratory motion. The proposed method, called PROspective Motion compensation using Pilot Tone (PROMPT), employs Pilot Tone technology and leverages machine learning principles to first learn complex respiratory-induced cardiac motion on a patient-specific basis and then prospectively compensate the motion by tracking the imaging plane, in real time, as a function of a Pilot Tone-based respiratory signal. If successful, this synergistic combination of Pilot Tone and machine learning will lead to 100% efficiency for single-shot CMR exams performed under free-breathing conditions, will eliminate the need to setup navigator echoes, respiratory bellows, or other inefficient prospective gating measures, will minimize through-plane motion that can render the images non-diagnostic for single-shot CMR applications, and will facilitate highly accelerated compressive recovery.

Congratulations Dr. Ahmad and team!