Cyclostationary analysis of ECG signals acquired inside an ultra-high field MRI scanner

In this paper, a strategy is proposed to estimate the R-peaks in ECG signals recorded inside a 7 T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner in order to reduce the disturbances due to the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effect and to finally obtain high quality cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) images. We first show that the cyclostationarity property of the ECG signal disturbed by the MHD effect can be quantified by means of cyclic spectral analysis. Then, this information is forwarded as input to a cyclostationary source extraction algorithm applied to a set of ECG recordings acquired inside the MRI scanner in a Feet first (Ff) and a Head first (Hf) positions. Finally, detection of the R-peaks in the estimated cyclostationary signal completes the proposed procedure. Validation of the method is performed by comparing the estimated with clinical R-peaks annotations provided with the real world dataset. The obtained results are promising and future research directions are discussed.