Dual-excitation flip-angle simultaneous cine and T 1 mapping using spiral acquisition with respiratory and cardiac self-gating

• Published in: Magnetic resonance in medicine 2021-07, Vol.86 (1), p.82-96
• Main Authors: Zhou, Ruixi, Weller, Daniel S, Yang, Yang, Wang, Junyu, Jeelani, Haris, Mugler, 3rd, John P, Salerno, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Breath Holding; Heart - diagnostic imaging; Humans; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Cine; Phantoms, Imaging; Reproducibility of Results
• ISSN: 0740-3194; 1522-2594
• DOI: 10.1002/mrm.28675

To develop a free-breathing cardiac self-gated technique that provides cine images and slice profile-corrected T maps from a single acquisition. Without breath-holding or electrocardiogram gating, data were acquired continuously on a 3T scanner using a golden-angle gradient-echo spiral pulse sequence, with an inversion RF pulse applied every 4 seconds. Flip angles of 3° and 15° were used for readouts after the first four and second four inversions. Self-gating cardiac triggers were extracted from heart image navigators, and respiratory motion was corrected by rigid registration on each heartbeat. Cine images were reconstructed from the steady-state portion of 15° readouts using a low-rank plus sparse reconstruction. The T maps were fit using a projection onto convex sets approach from images reconstructed using slice profile-corrected dictionary learning. This strategy was evaluated in a phantom and 14 human subjects. The self-gated signal demonstrated close agreement with the acquired electrocardiogram signal. The image quality for the proposed cine images and standard clinical balanced SSFP images were 4.31 (±0.50) and 4.65 (±0.30), respectively. The slice profile-corrected T values were similar to those of the inversion-recovery spin-echo technique in phantom, and had a higher global T value than that of MOLLI in human subjects. Cine and T mapping using spiral acquisition with respiratory and cardiac self-gating successfully acquired T maps and cine images in a single acquisition without the need for electrocardiogram gating or breath-holding. This dual-excitation flip-angle approach provides a novel approach for measuring T while accounting for and slice profile effect on the apparent .