Browsing by Author "Yoosefian, Ghazal"

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    Accurate Intramyocardial Hemorrhage Assessment with Fast, Free-running, Cardiac Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping
    (Radiological Society of North America, 2024) Huang, Yuheng; Guan, Xingmin; Zhang, Xinheng; Yoosefian, Ghazal; Ho, Hao; Huang, Li-Ting; Lin, Hsin-Yao; Anthony, Gregory; Lee, Hsu-Lei; Bi, Xiaoming; Han, Fei; Chan, Shing Fai; Vora, Keyur P.; Sharif, Behzad; Singh, Dhirendra P.; Youssef, Khalid; Li, Debiao; Han, Hui; Christodoulou, Anthony G.; Dharmakumar, Rohan; Yang, Hsin-Jung; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Purpose: To evaluate the performance of a high-dynamic-range quantitative susceptibility mapping (HDR-QSM) cardiac MRI technique to detect intramyocardial hemorrhage (IMH) and quantify iron content using phantom and canine models. Materials and Methods: A free-running whole-heart HDR-QSM technique for IMH assessment was developed and evaluated in calibrated iron phantoms and 14 IMH female canine models. IMH detection and iron content quantification performance of this technique was compared with the conventional iron imaging approaches, R2*(1/T2*) maps, using measurements from ex vivo imaging as the reference standard. Results: Phantom studies confirmed HDR-QSM’s accurate iron content quantification and artifact mitigation ability by revealing a strong linear relationship between iron concentration and QSM values (R2, 0.98). In in vivo studies, HDR-QSM showed significantly improved image quality and susceptibility homogeneity in nonaffected myocardium by alleviating motion and off-resonance artifacts (HDR-QSM vs R2*: coefficient of variation, 0.31 ± 0.16 [SD] vs 0.73 ± 0.36 [P < .001]; image quality score [five-point Likert scale:], 3.58 ± 0.75 vs 2.87 ± 0.51 [P < .001]). Comparison between in vivo susceptibility maps and ex vivo measurements showed higher performance of HDR-QSM compared with R2* mapping for IMH detection (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, 0.96 vs 0.75; P < .001) and iron content quantification (R2, 0.71 vs 0.14). Conclusion: In a canine model of IMH, the fast and free-running cardiac QSM technique accurately detected IMH and quantified intramyocardial iron content of the entire heart within 5 minutes without requiring breath holding.
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    Enabling Reliable Visual Detection of Chronic Myocardial Infarction with Native T1 Cardiac MRI Using Data-Driven Native Contrast Mapping
    (Radiological Society of North America, 2024) Youssef, Khalid; Zhang, Xinheng; Yoosefian, Ghazal; Chen, Yinyin; Chan, Shing Fai; Yang, Hsin-Jung; Vora, Keyur; Howarth, Andrew; Kumar, Andreas; Sharif, Behzad; Dharmakumar, Rohan; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Purpose: To investigate whether infarct-to-remote myocardial contrast can be optimized by replacing generic fitting algorithms used to obtain native T1 maps with a data-driven machine learning pixel-wise approach in chronic reperfused infarct in a canine model. Materials and Methods: A controlled large animal model (24 canines, equal male and female animals) of chronic myocardial infarction with histologic evidence of heterogeneous infarct tissue composition was studied. Unsupervised clustering techniques using self-organizing maps and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding were used to analyze and visualize native T1-weighted pixel-intensity patterns. Deep neural network models were trained to map pixel-intensity patterns from native T1-weighted image series to corresponding pixels on late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) images, yielding visually enhanced noncontrast maps, a process referred to as data-driven native mapping (DNM). Pearson correlation coefficients and Bland-Altman analyses were used to compare findings from the DNM approach against standard T1 maps. Results: Native T1-weighted images exhibited distinct pixel-intensity patterns between infarcted and remote territories. Granular pattern visualization revealed higher infarct-to-remote cluster separability with LGE labeling as compared with native T1 maps. Apparent contrast-to-noise ratio from DNM (mean, 15.01 ± 2.88 [SD]) was significantly different from native T1 maps (5.64 ± 1.58; P < .001) but similar to LGE contrast-to-noise ratio (15.51 ± 2.43; P = .40). Infarcted areas based on LGE were more strongly correlated with DNM compared with native T1 maps (R2 = 0.71 for native T1 maps vs LGE; R2 = 0.85 for DNM vs LGE; P < .001). Conclusion: Native T1-weighted pixels carry information that can be extracted with the proposed DNM approach to maximize image contrast between infarct and remote territories for enhanced visualization of chronic infarct territories.
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    Reliable Off-Resonance Correction in High-Field Cardiac MRI Using Autonomous Cardiac B0 Segmentation with Dual-Modality Deep Neural Networks
    (MDPI, 2024-02-23) Li, Xinqi; Huang, Yuheng; Malagi, Archana; Yang, Chia-Chi; Yoosefian, Ghazal; Huang, Li-Ting; Tang, Eric; Gao, Chang; Han, Fei; Bi, Xiaoming; Ku, Min-Chi; Yang, Hsin-Jung; Han, Hui; Medicine, School of Medicine
    B0 field inhomogeneity is a long-lasting issue for Cardiac MRI (CMR) in high-field (3T and above) scanners. The inhomogeneous B0 fields can lead to corrupted image quality, prolonged scan time, and false diagnosis. B0 shimming is the most straightforward way to improve the B0 homogeneity. However, today’s standard cardiac shimming protocol requires manual selection of a shim volume, which often falsely includes regions with large B0 deviation (e.g., liver, fat, and chest wall). The flawed shim field compromises the reliability of high-field CMR protocols, which significantly reduces the scan efficiency and hinders its wider clinical adoption. This study aims to develop a dual-channel deep learning model that can reliably contour the cardiac region for B0 shim without human interaction and under variable imaging protocols. By utilizing both the magnitude and phase information, the model achieved a high segmentation accuracy in the B0 field maps compared to the conventional single-channel methods (Dice score: 2D-mag = 0.866, 3D-mag = 0.907, and 3D-mag-phase = 0.938, all p < 0.05). Furthermore, it shows better generalizability against the common variations in MRI imaging parameters and enables significantly improved B0 shim compared to the standard method (SD(B0Shim): Proposed = 15 ± 11% vs. Standard = 6 ± 12%, p < 0.05). The proposed autonomous model can boost the reliability of cardiac shimming at 3T and serve as the foundation for more reliable and efficient high-field CMR imaging in clinical routines.