Cardiac MRI Circular Tagging

Summary

Background

Cardiac MRI tagging is a promising technique for noninvasively studying regional heart wall motion. To implement, tags are first formed in the myocardium using spatially dependent excitation methods and then a sequence of images are acquired at various phases of the cardiac cycle. Currently, tagging is implemented in the Cartesian coordinate system in which the gradient fields create only parallel taglines.

Although Cartesian tagging is most widely implemented, myocardium strain is conventionally presented in the polar coordinate system because it adapts best to the morphology and mechanics of the heart. Further, if tagging patterns were in either the radial or circumferential directions, as opposed to the Cartesian direction, strain calculations would be simplified.       

Innovation

Applications

•  Included as part of the cardiac package of MRI systems
• Assessment of myocardium function by observing wall thickening and/or wall motion 

Advantages

•  Compatible with the heart's morphology and movement
• Does not distort taglines
• Measurements are in the form necessary for today's clinical practice
• Adaptive to simpler mathematical algorithms for automatic calculations   

State Of Development

Patent Status

Related Materials

• CMR Tagging in the Polar Coordinate System.