Restoration of magnetohydrodynamic-corrupted 12-lead electrocardiogram to enhance cardiac monitoring during magnetic resonance imaging

The Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effect on the bloodstream, induced by the static magnetic field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) devices, distorts Electrocardiogram (ECG) components, and poses challenges to cardiac gating and monitoring during MRI examinations. Restoring ECG components from MHD-induced artifacts has always been a challenge, primarily due to the influence of numerous device-induced and physiological variables and the absence of paired ground truth clean ECG for validation. In this research, at first, we employ unpaired restoration of MHD-corrupted 12-lead ECG signals using one dimensional (1D) Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks (CycleGANs) for channel and patient orientation-specific restoration. Subsequently, a 1D-segmentation-based comprehensive restoration scheme is proposed based on the phase 1 outputs to simultaneously restore 12-channel ECG signals, irrespective of internal and external factors affecting ECG. By employing the proposed Magnetohydrodynamic Generative Adversarial Network (MHDGAN) and MHD-to-ECG Network (MHD2ECGNet) for unpaired and comprehensive restoration, we achieved an overall spectral correlation improvement of 92.56% and 77.64%, respectively. In R-peak detection, MHDGAN demonstrated an overall precision, recall, and F1-score of 98.14%, 94.12%, and 96.01%, respectively. The extracted heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) from the restored waveforms closely match the ground truth, as confirmed through quantitative and qualitative assessments. The proposed framework has proven effective in restoring MHD-corrupted ECG waveforms, even in the absence of paired ground truth labels and amidst compounding distortions from multiple sources.