Tagged MRI Based Cardiac Motion Modeling and Toxicity Evaluation in Breast Cancer Radiotherapy

Recent research showed radiation for breast cancer can increase heart risks (1, 2). In Ref. (2), it has been noted that for every Gy of radiation a women’s heart risk rises 7.4%. However, the correlation between radiation dose and heart tissue damage is still an open problem. A more accurate model of heart damage will significantly improve the heart safety for patients underwent radiotherapy. Modern radiation treatment planning systems (TPS) use computed tomography (CT) images for dose calculation and evaluation. For evaluation of heart toxicity from radiotherapy, the dose-volume histogram (DVH), which is generated by overlying radiation dose distribution on heart delineations in CT images, is widely used. However, there are three major factors that deteriorate the accuracy of TPS-calculated heart dose distribution. First conventional CT is a fundamentally static imaging modality without the capability to capture and depict the cardiac motion. Instead, heart is usually blurred in CT images due to the motion artifacts. Second, without special contrast dye, CT provides limited contrast between blood in heart chambers and the surrounding myocardium. The heart region in TPS is actually a mixture of myocardium and blood, although only the radiation dose to the myocardium is accountable for heart risks. Finally, there is significant intra- and inter-fractional heart motion. As heart beats involuntarily during and between radiation treatments, myocardium deforms and moves non-rigidly against the fixed radiation beam so that the static dose distribution calculated in CT based TPS does not reflect the accurate radiation dose distribution in heart. There is also concern on the choice of the heart function for the evaluation of radiation damage. Based on radiation beam geometry, only part of the heart will receive clinically significant level of radiation during breast cancer treatment. It is possible that the global heart function remains stable temporarily while cells in the irradiated part of the myocardium lose part or all of their functions. In this case, regional heart function, which can be derived from regional heart wall motion and strain analysis, is a better indication of heart damage corresponding to radiation dose. Although cardiac MRI is widely used in radiology for the diagnosis of heart disease, its application in radiation treatment planning is limited. For multiple reasons, it is not practical to use MRI directly for radiation treatment planning of breast cancer patients. However, via multimodality deformable image registration (DIR) between MRI and CT, MRI images may play a more critical role in the evaluation of the heart damage from whole breast radiation. Tagged MRI (tMRI) (3) is a relatively new imaging protocol that has been implemented in the detection and diagnosis of regional heart functional loss. tMRI methods record regional heart wall motion information as they create identifiable landmark bands (tags) in the myocardium to establish dense point to point correspondence between images. ECG-gated tMRI image sets can be acquired at different phases of the cardiac cycle using the corresponding pulse sequence. The 4D (3D plus time) cardiac motion model can be retrieved by image registration between tMRIs at different phases. In the following sessions, we use tMRI as an example to explain how additional heart function information in MRI is retrieved. It is our objective to demonstrate the additional information retrieved from MRI can help the evaluation and protection of heart risks for breast cancer patients, and we want to discuss the possibility of using MRI to establish a more accurate correlation between regional heart functional loss and radiation dose.