Expanding on a New Paradigm for MRI in Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect, affecting approximately 1% of live births. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is increasingly used in pediatric CHD patients due to its non-invasiveness, unrestricted field of view, and absence of ionizing radiation, making it attractive for sequential imaging and long-term follow-up. However, current CMR for very young children often necessitates general anesthesia and invasive intubation for diagnostic quality images.

This project builds upon recent successes in pioneering ferumoxytol-enhanced CMR techniques, which have provided unprecedented image quality and diagnostic value, changing how CMR is clinically performed at their center. This approach also alleviates concerns about gadolinium accumulation in tissues. This project aims to develop next-generation CMR that can be performed without invasive intubation, and potentially with reduced anesthesia/sedation exposure. Furthermore, the project proposes to build upon the improved CMR framework to develop advanced anatomical and hemodynamic modeling techniques for complex CHD; create a CMR image-based strategy to help inform patient surgical plans and ultimately predict surgical outcomes and expand multi-center collaborations to pool data and enable larger-scale studies.

The completion of this project is expected to result in the clinical deployment of new MRI pulse sequences, image acquisition and reconstruction strategies, and experimental and computational modeling methods, significantly boosting the value of CMR in managing children with congenital heart disease.

Contact PI: William Hsu; John Paul Finn (UCLA)

Funding Source:  NIH NHLBI