Four-dimensional respiratory motion-resolved whole heart coronary MR angiography

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 extradimension..