Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 1, 2026

Pulmonary Structural MRI using Free-Breathing, Self-Gated Ultra-short Echo Time Imaging
Published on: September 6, 2024
A dual-projection respiratory self-gating technique for whole-heart coronary MRA
Peng Lai1, Andrew C Larson, Xiaoming Bi
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA.
Purpose:
To investigate the accuracy of a dual-projection respiratory self-gating (DP-RSG) technique in dynamic heart position measurement and its feasibility for free-breathing whole-heart coronary MR angiography (MRA).
Materials And Methods:
A DP-RSG method is proposed to enable accurate direct measurement of heart position by acquiring two whole-heart projections. On 14 volunteers we quantitatively evaluated the efficacy of DP-RSG by comparison with diaphragmatic navigator (NAV) and single-projection-based respiratory self-gating (SP-RSG) methods. For DP-RSG we also compared center-of-mass and two profile-matching algorithms in deriving heart motion. Coronary imaging was conducted on eight volunteers based on retrospective gating to preliminarily validate the effectiveness of DP-RSG for whole-heart coronary MRA. Comparison of vessel delineation was performed between images reconstructed using different gating methods.
Results:
The quantitative evaluation shows that DP-RSG more accurately tracks heart motion than NAV with all gating window (GW) values and SP-RSG approaches with GW>or=2.5 mm and profile-matching algorithms are more reliable for motion derivation than center-of-mass calculations with GW>or=1.0 mm. Whole-heart coronary MRA studies demonstrate the feasibility of using DP-RSG to improve overall delineation of the coronary arteries.
Conclusion:
DP-RSG is a promising approach to better resolve respiratory motion for whole-heart coronary MRA compared to conventional NAV and SP-RSG.

