Fetal CMR Conference-Fetal CMR Conference 2021-03-24

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The webinar opened with conference instructions and a welcome from Donna Malone, noting over 175 registrants, chat-based questions, and a later Q&A. The first speaker, David Lloyd from Evelina London Children’s Hospital, described their fetal cardiac MRI program. He explained how the service began as a research effort in 2014, became a commissioned clinical program in 2019, and focused heavily on solving fetal motion through motion-correction and image reconstruction. He highlighted major clinical uses such as defining pulmonary venous anatomy, vascular rings, right aortic arch, coarctation, complex arterial supply, tumors, and lung findings that affect prognosis. He also described newer work allowing limited intracardiac assessment, flow analysis, and maternal oxygen studies.<br /><br />The second speaker, Mike Seed from SickKids Toronto, presented Toronto’s fetal CMR work, emphasizing technical advances including accelerated radial imaging, compressed sensing, motion correction, and metric-optimized gating. He reviewed research on fetal circulation, oxygen transport, ventricular function, myocardial injury, and fetal oximetry using T1/T2 mapping. He also showed clinical examples where fetal MRI clarified anatomy, guided fetal therapy, and influenced parental decision-making. Both speakers discussed practical setup: build multidisciplinary support, start with established sequences, accept that post-processing is still labor-intensive, and use fetal CMR selectively as an add-on to expert ultrasound rather than a replacement.

Keywords

fetal cardiac MRI

fetal CMR

motion correction

pulmonary venous anatomy

congenital heart disease

compressed sensing

fetal circulation

multidisciplinary support

ultrasound adjunct