Experimental Investigation of Interfering Factors in Cardiac Sensing of Beat Pilot Tone

Motivation: Beat Pilot Tone (BPT) has been proposed as a non-contact and accurate cardiac sensing method seamlessly integrated with MR systems. However, BPT is sensitive to interference, thereby limiting its ability to robustly obtain fine-grained cardiac waveform. Goal(s): Our goal was to demonstrate main factors that could lead to corrupted BPT signal. Approach: We conducted a series of comparative experiments on the hypothesized influencing factors. Results: The experiments suggested that BPT transmit power, imaging orientation and other physiological motion like respiration caused varying degradation to the BPT signal. Impact: The demonstration of interfering factors of BPT cardiac sensing could guide the correct BPT setup and interference suppression method design. This helps BPT to robustly obtain fine-grained cardiac waveform, which could be used for MR motion correction and clinical diagnosis.