A Mechatronic System for Interactive Scan Plan Prescription during Real-Time Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has many advantages as compared to traditional MRI and can be used for the visualization of dynamic moving cardiac structures and functions without cardiac gating, as the fast data acquisition apparently freezes the motion resulting from heart beating and lung breathing. During the past decades, fast pulse sequences and image reconstruction algorithms had been developed to improve the temporal resolution with acceptable spatial resolution. However, the bottle neck of current real-time MRI systems is the availability of a user-friendly prescription tool to allow a MRI technician to prescribe the 6-Degree-of-freedom imaging plane of the MRI system. To meet the needs of real-time MRI, a 3D input tool is developed which facilitates user interactive specification of the center position and plane orientation of the MRI imaging plane. This paper reports such a custom designed 6 degree-of-freedom 3D input device, which allows the user to interactively and intuitively manipulate the scan plane to direct the real-time imaging capability to a target position based on the visual feedback provided on the MRI console in the form of real-time MRI images