Single breath-hold 3D measurement of left atrial volume using compressed sensing cardiovascular magnetic resonance and a non-model-based reconstruction approach

Background: left atrial (la) dilatation is associated with a large variety of cardiac diseases. current cardiovascular magnetic resonance (cmr) strategies to measure la volumes are based on multi-breath-hold multi-slice acquisitions,which are time-consuming and susceptible to misregistration. aim: to develop a time-efficient single breath-hold 3d cmr acquisition and reconstruction method to precisely measure la volumes and function. methods: a highly accelerated compressed-sensing multi-slice cine sequence (cs-cinecmr) was combined with a non-model-based 3d reconstruction method to measure la volumes with high temporal and spatial resolution during a single breath-hold. this approach was validated in la phantoms of different shapes and applied in 3 patients. in addition,the influence of slice orientations on accuracy was evaluated in the la phantoms for the new approach in comparison with a conventional model-based biplane area-length reconstruction. as a reference in patients,a self-navigated high-resolution whole-heart 3d dataset (3d-hr-cmr) was acquired during mid-diastole to yield accurate la volumes. results: phantom studies. la volumes were accurately measured by cs-cinecmr with a mean difference of -4.73∈±∈1.75 ml (-8.67∈±∈3.54 %,r2∈=∈0.94). for the new method the calculated volumes were not significantly different when different orientations of the cs-cinecmr slices were applied to cover the la phantoms. long-axis aligned vs not aligned with the phantom long-axis yielded similar differences vs the reference volume (-4.87∈±∈1.73 ml vs -4.45∈±∈1.97 ml,p∈=∈0.67) and short-axis perpendicular vs not-perpendicular with the la long-axis (-4.72∈±∈1.66 ml vs -4.75∈±∈2.13 ml; p∈=∈0.98). the conventional bi-plane area-length method was susceptible for slice orientations (p∈=∈0.0085 for the interaction of slice orientation and reconstruction technique