# A New Paradigm for Rapid, Accurate Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging

> **NIH NIH R01** · OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $663,361

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) claims more lives and costs more than any other diagnostic group in the USA.
Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is a non-invasive imaging tool that provides the most accurate and
comprehensive assessment of the cardiovascular system, yet its role in clinical cardiology remains limited. A
major impediment to wider usage of CMR is the inefficient acquisition that makes CMR exams excessively
long, often lasting for more than an hour; this diminishes its efficiency and cost effectiveness relative to other
modalities. The current paradigm offers either a prolonged segmented acquisition that requires regular cardiac
rhythm and multiple breath-holds or a fallback option of real-time, free-breathing acquisition with degraded
spatial and temporal resolutions that are below the Society for Cardiac Magnetic Resonance guidelines. The
long-term goal of this investigation is to improve the diagnosis and evaluation of cardiovascular disease by
transforming the existing segmented CMR acquisition into a more efficient protocol. The new paradigm will
(i) eliminate the need to breath-hold, (ii) be effective in patients with arrhythmia, (iii) simplify the acquisition
protocol, (iv) reduce the scan time, (v) provide whole-heart coverage, and (vi) enable spatial and temporal
resolutions that rival the resolutions provided by segmented breath-held acquisition.
In the last two decades, MRI technology has evolved rapidly. More recently, the combination of parallel MR
imaging (pMRI) and compressive sensing (CS) recovery has been featured in numerous research studies and
has delivered unprecedented acceleration. While pMRI has been adopted by the MRI industry and is available
on almost all clinical platforms, CS recovery is still a long way away from routine clinical use. To bring CS
recovery to clinical realm, there are a number of challenges that need to be addressed, including the well-
recognized issues of long computation times and tuning parameters that require case-by-case adjustment.
In this work, we will develop and validate a versatile CS recovery method, called sparsity adaptive composite
recovery (SCoRe), that provides unmatched acceleration by exploiting sparsity across multiple
representations. More importantly, SCoRe provides a data-driven tuning of all free parameters and thus
eliminates the need to hand-tune regularization weights. Also, SCoRe is amenable to fast algorithms, and we
expect the SCoRe-based image recovery to take only seconds on a GPU-based computing environment.
We hypothesize that the proposed advances in data acquisition and processing will yield a new CMR protocol
that is faster, easier for both patient and operator, and reliable over a broader spectrum of patients. We expect
to achieve this objective by providing the necessary improvements in image quality (Aim 1), by reconstructing
images in times suitable for clinical use (Aim 2), by validating the performance of the methods (Aim 3), ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10171886
- **Project number:** 5R01HL135489-05
- **Recipient organization:** OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Rizwan Ahmad
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $663,361
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-07-01 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10171886

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10171886, A New Paradigm for Rapid, Accurate Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (5R01HL135489-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10171886. Licensed CC0.

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