FDA Clears Compressed Sensing MRI Acceleration Technology From Siemens Healthineers
Siemens Healthineers has announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the company’s revolutionary Compressed Sensing technology, which slashes the long acquisition times associated with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to enable dramatically shortened scans. For example, cardiac cine imaging with Compressed Sensing can be completed in just 16 seconds rather than the traditional four minutes, courtesy of an algorithm that reduces the required amount of data.1 With products and solutions such as Compressed Sensing, as well as a new name that underscores the company’s pioneering spirit and engineering expertise, Siemens Healthineers – the separately managed healthcare business of Siemens AG – is helping to enable healthcare providers worldwide to meet current challenges and excel in their respective environments.
“Siemens Healthineers takes great pride in offering customers our Compressed Sensing technology, which enables free-breathing, high-quality MR imaging at a vastly accelerated rate,” said Murat Gungor, Vice President of Magnetic Resonance at Siemens Healthineers North America. “As customers adapt to disease and service trends in their target markets, Compressed Sensing can help them accommodate the needs of entirely new patient groups.”
Compressed Sensing enables MR images of diagnostic quality using fewer data points. Iterative methods enable reconstruction of high-resolution MR images with no loss in information. Additionally, the efficient inline reconstruction algorithm of Compressed Sensing supports a high degree of clinical throughput. The acquired data are calculated directly at the MRI scanner, with no need to export or externally process that data.
In cardiac imaging, Compressed Sensing Cardiac Cine takes full advantage of this inline reconstruction algorithm. Rather than hold their breath 10 to 14 times over a four-minute period, patients are able to breathe freely, with images acquired in roughly 16 seconds. Motion artifacts created by breathing and heartbeats are effectively eliminated, which benefits older and critically ill patients who are unable to hold their breath.
The speed of Compressed Sensing Cardiac Cine also enables new patient groups, including those with cardiac arrhythmias, to access cardiac MRI for the first time. Where low diagnostic quality once prevented these patient subsets from realizing any benefit from cardiac MRI, the adaptive triggering of Compressed Sensing permits recording of the entire cardiac cycle – including the late diastolic phase – in real time with only one breath-hold. Also, Compressed Sensing Cardiac Cine images can be used to accurately quantify left ventricular function.