Improving scans for children with heart disease

Towards comprehensive assessment of heart disease in children using real-time cardiovascular magnetic resonance

A technique called cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is widely used as the best method of scanning children people with heart disease. However, current CMR techniques require people to hold their breath, which children often find difficult. Dr Muthurangu hopes to develop a type of CMR that doesn’t require this and can be performed very quickly. He plans to use a technique called ‘real time’ CMR imaging, which means that the scans can collected much more quickly, don’t require breath-holding and the images can be seen by doctors while the scans are being carried out. But one major challenge with real time CMR is that high quality images have to be created very quickly but this currently takes a long time. Professor Muthurangu wants to solve this by using a new type of computer program called ‘deep learning’. This involves teaching a computer to quickly create images by training it with images that have already been collected. They will combine this with ‘accelerated acquisition’ methods that take the scans much faster. This would allow doctors to perform CMR that does not require breath holding and could reduce scan times by up to 20 minutes. If successful, this research would change current practice for children with heart disease, but could also be extended to scanning adult patients too.