Lung Ventilation-Perfusion Imaging Approaches in the Single Ventricle Heart

Motivation: Techniques have been developed to conduct non-invasive lung ventilation and perfusion imaging with MRI. In single ventricle patients, their pulmonary blood flow is non-pulsatile, so it is unknown if these techniques will work in this patient population. Goal(s): To investigate whether new ventilation/perfusion techniques work in absence of pulsatile lung blood flow seen in single ventricle subjects. Approach: We imaged human subjects with normal and single ventricle hearts and post-processed the data through two ventilation-perfusion pipelines to assess feasibility. Results: The normal subjects demonstrate similar ventilation and perfusion patterns in both pipelines. Single ventricle subjects demonstrate similar ventilation maps but differing perfusion maps. Impact: These results will help to determine which imaging approaches work best for patients with single ventricle heart defects, which will provide functional information for research and clinical use.