AUTHORS: Piccini D, Feng L, Bonanno G, Coppo S, Yerly J, Lim RP, Schwitter J, Sodickson D, Otazo R, Stuber M

Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 77(4): 1473-1484, April 2017

ABSTRACT

Purpose: 

Free-breathing whole-heart coronary MR angiography (MRA) commonly uses navigators to gate respiratory motion, resulting in lengthy and unpredictable acquisition times. Conversely, self-navigation has 100% scan efficiency, but requires motion correction over a broad range of respiratory displacements, which may introduce image artifacts. We propose replacing navigators and self-navigation with a respiratory motion-resolved reconstruction approach.

Methods: 

Using a respiratory signal extracted directly from the imaging data, individual signal-readouts are binned according to their respiratory states. The resultant series of undersampled images are reconstructed using an extradimensional golden-angle radial sparse parallel imaging (XD-GRASP) algorithm, which exploits sparsity along the respiratory dimension. Whole-heart coronary MRA was performed in 11 volunteers and four patients with the proposed methodology. Image quality was compared with that obtained with one-dimensional respiratory self-navigation.

Results: 

Respiratory-resolved reconstruction effectively suppressed respiratory motion artifacts. The quality score for XD-GRASP reconstructions was greater than or equal to self-navigation in 80/88 coronary segments, reaching diagnostic quality in 61/88 segments versus 41/88. Coronary sharpness and length were always superior for the respiratory-resolved datasets, reaching statistical significance (P < 0.05) in most cases.

Conclusion: 

XD-GRASP represents an attractive alternative for handling respiratory motion in free-breathing whole heart MRI and provides an effective alternative to self-navigation.

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