Research Article Free-Breathing 3D Imaging of Right Ventricular Structure and Function Using Respiratory and Cardiac Self-Gated Cine MRI Yanchun Zhu, 1,2,3 Jing Liu, 3 Jonathan Weinsaft, 4 Pascal Spincemaille, 3 Thanh D. Nguyen, 3 Martin R. Prince, 3 Shanglian Bao, 2 Yaoqin Xie, 1 and Yi Wang 3 1 Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1068 Xueyuan Avenue, Shenzhen University Town, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, China 2 Beijing City Key Lab of Medical Physics and Engineering, School of Physics, Peking University, 201 Chengfu Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100871, China 3 Department of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, 515 East 71th Street, New York, NY 10021, USA 4 Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, 520 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10065, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Yaoqin Xie; yq.xie@siat.ac.cn and Yi Wang; yiwang@med.cornell.edu Received 15 August 2014; Revised 26 September 2014; Accepted 7 October 2014 Academic Editor: Volker Rasche Copyright © 2015 Yanchun Zhu et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Providing a movie of the beating heart in a single prescribed plane, cine MRI has been widely used in clinical cardiac diagnosis, especially in the lef ventricle (LV). Right ventricular (RV) morphology and function are also important for the diagnosis of cardiopulmonary diseases and serve as predictors for the long term outcome. Te purpose of this study is to develop a self-gated free-breathing 3D imaging method for RV quantifcation and to evaluate its performance by comparing it with breath-hold 2D cine imaging in 7 healthy volunteers. Compared with 2D, the 3D RV functional measurements show a reduction of RV end-diastole volume (RVEDV) by 10%, increase of RV end-systole volume (RVESV) by 1.8%, reduction of RV systole volume (RVSV) by 21%, and reduction of RV ejection fraction (RVEF) by 12%. High correlations between the two techniques were found (RVEDV: 0.94; RVESV: 0.85; RVSV: 0.95; and RVEF: 0.89). Compared with 2D, the 3D image quality measurements show a small reduction in blood SNR, myocardium-blood CNR, myocardium contrast, and image sharpness. In conclusion, the proposed self-gated free- breathing 3D cardiac cine imaging technique provides comparable image quality and correlated functional measurements to those acquired with the multiple breath-hold 2D technique in RV. 1. Introduction Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is a widely used non- invasive imaging method for depicting cardiac structure, function, perfusion, and viability [1]. Cine MRI can capture the cyclic contraction and relaxation of the heart, enabling the evaluation of ventricular and valvular function as well as shunt detection [2]. Cardiac cine images are conven- tionally acquired using a breath-hold 2D balanced steady- state free procession (SSFP) pulse sequence, which can provide accurate and reproducible volume quantifcation [3] of both the lef ventricle (LV) [4, 5] and the right ventricle (RV) [6–8]. However, the accuracy can be compromised by the slice misregistration due to inconsistent breath-holding levels during subsequent 2D scans and also by the slice gap ofen used to shorten the number of required breath- holds in less cooperative patients. Breath-hold 3D SSFP cine MRI has been developed to overcome these challenges by providing contiguous spatial coverage without gap and eliminating slice misregistration. However, this approach requires a long breath-hold, which is not suitable for older patients, particularly those with cardiopulmonary diseases. A major limitation of breath-hold cine MRI in general is spatial resolution, which is constrained by the length of the breath-hold. Finally, compared to free breathing, breath holding alters the intrathoracic pressure which can impact right ventricular flling. Recently, respiratory and cardiac self-gated cardiac cine MRI pulse sequences have emerged as promising imaging approaches for achieving higher resolution during free Hindawi Publishing Corporation BioMed Research International Volume 2015, Article ID 819102, 9 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/819102