Q&A with Lorenzo Di Sopra, Matthias Stuber, and Jérôme Yerly

January 10, 2020

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Today we meet Lorenzo Di Sopra, Matthias Stuber, and Jérôme Yerly, whose latest MRM paper introduces a user-friendly cardiac protocol that acquires 5D whole-heart images with just the push of a button.

For those who would like to get a quick overview of our discussion, below is an annotation of the interview. Clicking on the timestamp will take you to the exact video location where the topic is discussed.

<br /> 0:00 Intro: Lorenzo is in the 4th year of his PhD studies at the University Hospital in Lausanne. Jérôme finished his PhD in 2013 in Calgary where he worked on neuroimaging with Richard Frayne. Matthias has been around for a while:)

<br /> 3:55 Lorenzo explains what 'free-running' means: no gating and no worries that the wrong scan plane was acquired. Matthias points out that this concept is a ‘no-brainer’ for the brain folks but it is revolutionary for cardiac imaging.

<br /> 8:00 Audioslides, in which we find out how to achieve a free-running and self-gated whole-heart acquisition.

15:12 We are borrowing from nature here: A discussion of the golden angle and how undersampling works when the acquisition is not Cartesian.

<br /> 18:30 Cardiac triggers are used to align each single cardiac cycle in a consistent way. Matthias points out the difficulty of using ECG to trigger the acquisition and Lorenzo explains how they use PCA and ICA to acquire self-gated triggers.

23:03 Jérôme talks about the main hurdle for clinical translation – reconstruction time. .