Fast ungated five-dimensional cardiac MRI on a 1.5 T MR-linac for MRI-guided radiotherapy

Abstract

Background: Stereotactic arrhythmia radio-ablation (STAR) for patients with ventricular tachycardia is currently limited by complex cardiorespiratory motion. Current 5D-MRI motion models require long acquisition and reconstruction times, limiting clinical viability. Objective: To develop a fast, ungated 5D-MRI reconstruction method for personalized motion characterization to support MRI-guided STAR treatments. Methods: We propose a fast, ungated 5D-MRI reconstruction method based on the CMR-MOTUS framework. The method uses a 3D Cartesian acquisition with a joint optimization framework to reconstruct a motion-corrected reference image and low-rank deformation vector fields (DVFs). By exploiting the low rank structure, we explicitly disentangle respiratory and cardiac motion during optimization. Then, the DVFs are used for 5D-MRI reconstruction with a retrospectively adjustable number of motion states. Validation was performed using digital and physical cardiorespiratory phantoms. Furthermore, the approach was evaluated using 10 healthy volunteers, comparing motion consistency with 2D cine MRI. Results: Validation of 5D CMR-MOTUS using digital and physical phantoms demonstrated accurate 5D-MRI reconstruction. In the physical phantom, 5D CMR-MOTUS achieved a left-ventricle DICE of 0.96 +/- 0.01. In the volunteer cohort, the 5D-MRI scans showed strong motion to 2D cine MRI, with a cardiac motion error of 0.1 +/- 0.9 mm and a respiratory motion error of 0.2 +/- 2.9 mm. Crucially, 5D-MRI data were acquired in 1 minute and reconstructed in 6 minutes. Conclusions: The proposed 5D-MRI method enables rapid, high-quality, and personalized motion characterization, demonstrating potential for integration into MRI-guided STAR treatments. Data Availability: The 3D k-space data and 5D reconstructions for the ten volunteers are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21278894