by
Christina Hwang, Contributing Reporter | May 17, 2016
High frequency percussive
ventilation may reduce artifacts
and speed up scan time
High frequency percussive ventilation, a new technique for cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), may help improve imaging quality by removing a patient’s need to breathe, a study out of University Hospital Lausanne in Switzerland has revealed.
For this noninvasive procedure, patients put a mask over their mouth, which is connected to a ventilator that delivers small volumes of air. Instead of patients taking 10 to 15 large breathes, air is provided in 300 to 500 small puffs each minute.
The study included a 38 year old healthy volunteer and a 55 year old patient with a thymic lesion, and the volunteer did not breathe for 10 minutes while the patient did not breathe for six minutes.
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Since the air volumes are small, the chest will not move, according to the announcement, and this lack of motion allows physicians to more accurately plan the field of radiation to apply to each patient.
“In many imaging techniques, but particularly in CMR, you need a relatively long acquisition time and must correct for respiratory motion,” said professor Juerg Schwitter, director of the Cardiac MR Center at the University Hospital Lausanne, Switzerland, in a statement.
In the study, researchers were able to see both individuals’ coronary arteries and pulmonary vessels with no need to correct for respiratory motion, and Schwitter said that the patients felt like their chest was a bit inflated but otherwise thought the procedure was okay.
CMR images are usually acquired in steps, in which the patient breathes in and holds their breathe for each image, then recovers before the process is repeated, according to the announcement.
With high frequency percussive ventilation, physicians can acquire higher quality images in less time with fewer artifacts. However, Schwitter acknowledges that the technique is still in a very early stage of development and a larger patient population will have to be tested. Additionally, he said, some patients may find it difficult because the CMR machine is small and they will have to be ventilated by a machine.
Schwitter hopes that in the future, patients using high frequency percussive ventilation might not have to breathe for 20 minutes or even longer so a 3-D image of the cardiac structures could be accurately presented.
